Loony Of The Week

That's if the flag is hanging on a wall or the like. This one is on a pole extending out from the front porch, so I'd say that it's mounted correctly, but by that technicality. Hanging displays must place the union in the upper left corner when viewed, a rule that is far to often violated by simply rotating the flag. Then of course that wouldn't work on the starboard side of a vehicle where the union is placed fore and not aft.She should have at least had the picture taken from the other side so that it would have appeared more correct.

OK, he hates furriners who shop at Sears. I know what he's talking about, because I've seen them too! When the Sears at the South Forks Mall in Grand Forks, ND, would have its big annual sale (Memorial Day? Labor Day? After 35 years I forget which it was), they'd be flooded with Canadians taking advantage of our sale!

I served for 5 years in eastern North Dakota (the cold part of the state). When I tell people about "too cold to snow", they never believe me.

What I saw was the President voicing a "what-if" and mentioning as a contrast that other countries have required voting. And in Athens' first great experiment in democracy, nobody wanted to go cast their vote so the officials had to gather up all the citizens and force them to go the amphitheatre to cast their votes. It is very difficult to get people to do their civic duty.And, yes, if everybody here were to vote then it would indeed make a difference.

Around 1970 my friend's family converted to the then-burgeoning fundamentalism as part of the "Jesus Freak" movement. We read all the Chick Pubs we could because they were so hilarious. I even read the original "Big Daddy?"Years later when I used a public restroom, I found that somebody had placed a Chick Pubs tract on top of the toiler paper dispenser in each stall. That was very thoughtful of that person and I did appreciate the sentiment, but those pages were just too small to be of much use for wiping myself.

Many normals may not be aware of the fact that "true Christians" need to use their own special kind of counselors and therapists. That is because "true Christians" do not think like normals do.Dan Barker (Freedom From Religion Foundation, "America's Leading Atheist") described it when I first heard him speak in the mid-1980's shortly after he had deconverted from a life-long belief in fundamentalism (he had also been a fundamentalist minister having been personally called to the ministry at age 11 by God Himself). In that speech, Barker described fundamentalism as being when your theology becomes your psychology. All your thought processes become based on fundamentalist theology and you filter everything you see and hear and think and feel through that theology (please also refer to Glenn R. Morton's talk.origins Post of the Month for February 2002, "Morton's Demon" which describes aspects of that regarding YECs). Add to that the collected experiences of all us normals here who have ever tried to reason with YECs or just about any fundamentalist. They quite literally think differently than us normals, hence they need their own special counselors.I have personally seen this in action. A local mega-church's singles ministry organized huge presentations by a pair of Christian counselors which was very strongly attended (huge main chapel auditorium much more than half filled by singles from at least two local megachurches). A number of things that they said was the same as is said by counselors for normals (eg, setting boundaries, being selective of the people you associate with in terms of where they will lead you), but then they would always go weird. Well, weird to a normal, but right on target for a fundie. For example, there are things that you need to do to straighten out your life. Why should you do that? Because that is what Jesus wants you to do. Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot-Oscar? So then if you are not a Christian, there is no reason for you to try to make your life better? Really?? Similarly in the DivorceCare program they not only state explicitly, but they repeat it over and over again that you can never ever possibly recover from a divorce, but rather only Jesus can do it for you. So then non-Christians are just plain screwed? Thank you very much, sir! May I have another one please? (somebody please identify that first speaking part in a movie for Kevin Bacon)I am living evidence that Christian counselors are of worse than no help to normals. Similarly, I would assume, fundamentalists are unable to find help from normal counselors. Sad as it sounds, that bat-quano-crazy "therapist" is perhaps the only kind of person that a fundamentalist can listen to as a counselor. Which to me speaks of a much more serious problem.

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Since we are not supposed to present bare links, here are some excerpts from "Morton's Demon":

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Maxwell suggested a famous demon which could violate the laws of thermodynamics. The demon, sitting between two rooms, controls a gate between the two rooms. When the demon sees a speedy molecule coming his way (from room A), he opens the gate and lets the speedy molecule leave the room and when he sees a slow molecule coming at the gate (from room A), he holds it closed. Oppositely, when he sees a speedy molecule coming at the gate from room B he closes the gate but when he sees a slow molecule from room B coming toward the gate he opens it. In this way, the demon segregates the fast moving molecules into one room from the slow ones in the other. Since temperature of a gas is related to the velocity of the molecules, the demon would increase the temperature of room B and cool room A without any expenditure of energy. And since a temperature difference can be used to create useful work, the demon would create a perpetual motion machine.

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The reason I mention this is because I realized tonight that the YECs have a demon of their own. In a conversation with a YEC, I mentioned certain problems which he needed to address. Instead of addressing them, he claimed that he didn't have time to do the research. With other YECs, I have found that this is not the case (like with sds@mp3.com who refused my offer to discuss the existence of the geologic column by stating "It's on my short list of topics to pursue here. It's not up next, but perhaps before too long." Message-ID: a3bv4t$v2m$1@slb1.atl.mindspring.net ) And with other YECs, they claim lack of expertise to evaluate the argument and thus won't make a judgment about the validity of the criticism. Still other YECs refuse to read things that might disagree with them.

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Thus was born the realization that there is a dangerous demon on the loose. When I was a YEC, I had a demon that did similar things for me that Maxwell's demon did for thermodynamics. Morton's demon was a demon who sat at the gate of my sensory input apparatus and if and when he saw supportive evidence coming in, he opened the gate. But if he saw contradictory data coming in, he closed the gate. In this way, the demon allowed me to believe that I was right and to avoid any nasty contradictory data. Fortunately, I eventually realized that the demon was there and began to open the gate when he wasn't looking.

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However, my conversations have made me aware that each YEC is a victim of my demon. Morton's demon makes it possible for a person to have his own set of private facts which others are not privy to, allowing the YEC to construct a theory which is perfectly supported by the facts which the demon lets through the gate. And since these are the only facts known to the victim, he feels in his heart that he has explained everything. Indeed, the demon makes people feel morally superior and more knowledgeable than others.

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The demon makes its victim feel very comfortable as there is no contradictory data in view. The demon is better than a set of rose colored glasses. The demon's victim does not understand why everyone else doesn't fall down and accept the victim's views. After all, the world is thought to be as the victim sees it and the demon doesn't let through the gate the knowledge that others don't see the same thing. Because of this, the victim assumes that everyone else is biased, or holding those views so that they can keep their job, or, in an even more devious attack by my demon, they think that their opponents are actually demon possessed themselves or sons of Satan. This is a devious demon!

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Do please follow that link to read the entire post and be able to use the embedded links (assuming that they are not already broken).It should also be noted that Maxwell's Demon is a thermodynamics thought experiment. Not that any YEC has ever understood thermodynamics.

NPR reports on Trump's appearance before an evangelical group, the Values Voter Summit.Speaking of the relief efforts:

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He said he was in contact with leaders in all the ravaged areas, including the president of the Virgin Islands. However, there is no president of the U.S. territory that would be Trump himself.

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I very much doubt that he's even in contact with himself.

Oddly enough, it is real. There was even a convention recently.Just off-hand, I would assume that it's part of the larger anti-science mentality which we see so much of from the YECs. They feel that science conflicts with or even refutes with certain key points of things that they believe, so they want science to simply go away. But they also like their computers, the Internet, and flush toilets too much, so they also don't want science to go away. So they end up taking a cafeteria approach of picking and choosing which parts of science they want to keep and which parts they want to get rid of -- pretty much the same approach that they take with religion and with the Bible.In the case of the Bible, they just ignore what they don't like, but in the case of science they look for things that science had gotten wrong and use that as an excuse to reject other things that they believe science had gotten wrong, but without having to reject those parts of science that brought them the things that they do like such as computers, microwave ovens, and flush toilets (in a last-season episode of Dark Matter the ship gets sent back in time a few centuries to modern-day earth; one character's primary concern was what kind of toilets existed in this primitive era).A real-life example of creationists attacking science for apparently no other reason than to just discredit science was when local creationist Bill Morgan (he has several YouTube videos of presentations and debates) reported on a presentation at the local creationist club about the ozone layer -- he was VP of that club and published a monthly newsletter, which is where he would report on a speaker's presentation at the previous meeting. I describe it at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/morgan/q_ozone.html. Basically, the speaker claimed that everything scientists were saying about refrigerants causing the hole in the ozone layer at the South Pole was based completely on laboratory experiments. That speaker presented a series of questions that he claimed had not been answered. Curiously, when I went to NOAA's site and to the pages about the ozone layer, those exact-same questions were presented in the FAQ and they were all answered. That speaker also argued that those heavy refrigerant molecules could never get up into the upper atmosphere to do damage was contrary to that site's report of the levels of those refrigerants found at various altitudes based on air samples taken by sounding rockets.BTW, a key part of that speaker's claim, which Bill Morgan had adopted, was that no scientist had ever answered that list of questions, despite the simple fact that those very same questions were part of NOAA's FAQ.On that page given above, I have a timeline of Bill Morgan's use of this claim:

• April 1998. Bill Morgan reports on that presentation in his newsletter, so that presentation would have been at the March 1998 meeting. I immediately research the question, find that NOAA page which answered each and every question raised by his article. His response is to run away.
• Late 1998, Bill Morgan posts that article on his web site -- unchanged. In our email corresondence, I pointed out that I had already informed him that those claims were wrong, so why was he posting something that he already knew was false? He at first tried to equivocate, but then just simply ran away yet again.
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  Please note that at the time Bill Morgan posted that article, he already knew that it was false. That constitutes deliberate lying. Even if an argument for ignorance could be made for that instance, it cannot be made for the several times he continued to use that claim because I kept pointing out to him that it was false.
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• A year or two later he put up a new website which still included that very same ozone-layer article completely unchanged -- that informed me that he had deliberately chosen to include a claim that he already knew was false.
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  Yet again I took Bill to task for his actions and yet again he refused to take responsibility for his own actions.
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  I believe that it was this time (hey, I'm having to remember back nearly two decades here) that I led in by asking why he deliberately posted false claims on his web site. He responded with a typical Bill-Morgan boastfulness that he went out of his way to ensure that everything he posted was true and that if he ever discovered that one of his claims was not true then he would take it down immediately.
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  I pointed out, yet again, that he knew that his "Ozone Layer" article was false and yet had yet again deliberately chosen to post it on his new website. Yet again, Bill immediately ran away and refused to respond to my follow-up emails. And, no, he never removed that article from that website.
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• Several years later, 2007 June 18, I relocated Bill's website (fishdontwalk.com, whose very name is a lie, considering walking catfish, snakeheads, and mudskippers). Bill's "Ozone Layer" article was still posted on that page. Only this time it bore the date of "Monday, January 17, 2005", which I assume is when he had created the site. This is despite the fact that it actually dates from April 1998 (lies upon lies!). So much for Bill Morgan's empty boast that he would remove a false claim immediately. Yet again I email Bill about how he is deliberately lying to the public by posting that article and yet again he runs away.
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• Two years later, 2009 August, I found the site of Rational Responders who had had their own bitter experiences with Bill's lying. He had again used his deliberate lie about the ozone layer. Apparently in response to their critique of him and his dishonest practices, his site suddenly disappeared.
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• Two years later, 2011 October, we briefly renewed our correspondence and I broached the subject yet again. This time, after much arguing back and forth, Bill agrees to remove the "ozone layer" article from his site. However, he still insisted CFCs cannot possibly be in the stratosphere because he himself could not understand how. He still refused to accept the explanation of atmospheric scientists from NOAA and he still tried to ignore the direct and empirical observation of the presence of CFCs in the stratosphere as well as the direct and empirical measurements of their concentrations. In response to our discussion, he ran away yet again.
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  However this time, the text of the article did eventually disappear, though the links to it remained. About time! It only took thirteen (13) years!
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• Four years later, 2015, his site was still down except for a few features, none of which were the old articles, so no sign of his ozone layer lie. However, he does lead in with his ridiculous "chicken or the egg" argument in which he falsely imagines that a newly evolved chicken would have to have re-evolved all the systems in its body, including its reproductive system. And of course he refuses to explain that claim too

But the main question about that ozone layer lie is why he considered it so important that he kept using it in spite of the knowledge from the start that it was false and why it had even been made in the first place.I think that creationists are driven to find and point out where science has been wrong about something just so that they can then arbitrarily choose which parts of science to ignore. We saw the same thing at work when CRR argued so doggedly to prove Neil deGrasse Tyson and Galileo wrong about ballistics. Whatever does ballistics and gravity have to do with evolution? All he wanted was to be able to say that scientists were wrong about something.Back to Flat Earthism, frequent NCSE contributor Schadewald wrote an article about flat-earthers, at which time there were so few that the Flat Earth Society basically had only one member. Flat-earthers and YECs often get lumped together in terms of their ignorance of and disdain for science. That irritates YECs such that either Gish or H. Morris made a public statement that there are no member of the ICR is a flat-earther. Shortly after that, they received an angry letter cancelling his membership which said, "Now there isn't!"

"Tom Swift and His Steam Powered Rocket."BTW, in 1911 "Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle" was published. Decades later, "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle" became the acronym, TASER.

From what I read, this guy became a flat-earther only one year ago.

Terrible, I'm sure. It's undoubtedly being blocked by his tinfoil hat acting as a Faraday cage.

Reminds me of instances of bouncy castles getting carried away by the wind with kids inside them.HINT: rope is a lot less expensive than kids.

I remember a few decades ago when CDs became big, Fry's carried a few "adult" CDs and local fundamentalists were picketing the store every weekend for I forget how many months (if not years).

They do screen blood donations along with identifying at-risk donors through the questionaires. I don't remember when it started, but it was more explicit in the Navy Reserve where maintaining readiness to mobilize was of paramount importance. We were required to undergo annual physical examinations which, once a blood test was developed, included an annual HIV test. When I was the XO and acting CO of a reserve unit in my last decade of service, the annual HIV test was one of the important items that we would track.The following is intended more for lurkers.A German TV series has aired on Sundance: Deutschland 83, Deutschland 86, and the upcoming final season, Deutschland 89. Based around a fictional East German Volkspolizist turned into a relucant spy in the West codename "Kolibri" ("Hummingbird"), it also examines East/West politics and events at the time as well as important events.For example, key to Deutschland 83 was an upcoming NATO exercise, Able Archer 83, which included the simulated launch of Pershing II nuclear missiles, scheduled to be deployed in West Germany, by the Bundeswehr. The Soviet Union feared that that exercise was a ruse to mask a first strike against them (Russians have a long history of national border-defense paranoia and for good reason), so they created Operation RYAN (Raketno-Yadernoe Napadenie (Russian: - , "Nuclear Missile Attack"), itself a first strike attack against the West to preclude our own perceived first strike against them. Of course, in the show Kolibri saves the day and the world, but that incident is considered by some to have brought us much closer to nuclear war than the Cuban Missile Crisis did.The events of Deutschland 86 were a bit different, mainly involving Libyan terrorism (eg, the discothque bombing in Berlin and the retaliatory Operation El Dorado Canyon air strike) and East Germany's attempts to deal with its economic problems after the Soviet Union stopped supporting them. Some of the schemes were medical, such as using East German patients as test subjects for the West's drug trials much more cheaply than could have been done in the West (ain't capitalism great?).Pertinent to this discussion was the issue of ensuring against HIV-infected blood transfusions, which tells me that as of 1986 there was probably not yet a reliable test for HIV. East Germany claimed that its blood supply was pure because they did not have a "homosexual problem". On that basis, they were able to sell East German blood to the West. But once it was exposed that even East German blood could be infected, that revenue source dried up (or coagulated, if you would).In another scheme as depicted in the show, a central character (a high-ranking Stasi officer who had forced Kolibri to become a spy as well as being Kolibri's estranged father) was a fan of the West German TV show, Das Traumschiff (literally "The Dream Boat", but it's more like "The Love Boat") -- another German TV show on Netflix, The Same Sky (apparently also on Amazon), depicts that at least in 1974 East Germans were no allowed to watch West German TV such that they would keep track of which direction your TV antenna was pointed. The German Wikipedia page for Das Traumschiff reports that they switched to a new ship in 1986, which meant that their old ship was up for sale. This Stasi officer's idea was to buy the old ship to use as a moral incentive for East German workers, whereas the lower decks would be refitted to contain contraband military cargo from West Germany for such destinations as South Africa (which was being embargoed at that time). And in all those discussions the woman pushing for these revenue-gathering schemes would tout them as "Das ist eine Win-Win Situation." while all the die-hard communists in the room would squirm at becoming capitalists.Regarding the scenes about Operation El Dorado Canyon, a young US diplomat to East Germany is living on the economy with his wife. Their next-door neighbor is the aforementioned Stasi officer, which is what they had been briefed to expect. When they move in, he offers them the traditional housewarming gifts of bread and salt -- the bread in hopes that they never go hungry and salt that their life there would have flavor (or so I seem to gather). They accept having no idea what's going on, but she gives him some chocolate chip cookies she had just baked and he accepts having no idea what's going on. Later, Operation El Dorado Canyon hits in the middle of the night. The diplomat receives a phone call at 0200 or 0300 to come to the office immediately. As he exits his apartment, he stands face-to-face with his Stasi neighbor who is doing the same thing. They look at each other in silence. Then in silence they both walk to the elevator, ride it down to the ground floor (their first floor is our second), and exit the building to the sidewalk in silence. Then they look at each other one more time in silence and turn in opposite directions to go to their respective offices. 
According to my Roku (which I recently had to buy in order to keep using Netflix), Deutschland 83 is not being streamed, but can be bought on a subscription. Deutschland 86 is supposed to available on Hulu. Deutschland 89 is supposed to be out in 2020.

It was a few years ago from a slightly crazed-looking fundamentalist that I first heard talk of the human microbiome. Basically as we've always known, we are hosts to all kinds of tiny kritters and there exists some kind of symbiotic relationships between us and them, but he was trying to extend that further.The simplest example is that microbes in our gut aid in our digestion, such that when we use antibiotics they also kill those beneficial microbes and our digestion and elimination gets messed up and doesn't get straightened out until our gut microbes can get reestablished. An example of this is the range of probiotic products for us to consume towards that end.Apparently, there have been some findings linking our biomes with our state of mind (eg, if my gut is out of whack, then of course I'm going to feel extra shitty, but it's supposed to be much more subtle and extensive than that).So this fundamentalist was espousing something like what makes us gay is our own biome. And our intimate interactions with others result in an infusion of biomes. So then if you take one up the tailpipe from a gay guy, you will be infused with a gay biome and that would cause you to become gay yourself. Of course, that begs the question that if you were not gay nor leaning gay to begin with, why would you have taken one up the tailpipe in the first place?So this fundamentalist's conclusion was that homosexuality is contagious. That intimate contact with a gay person could pass his biome on to you and turn you gay through your newly acquired gut feelings. Sorry, but I would still argue your engaging in intimate contact with a gay person would be an indication that you were already gay. Though this fundamentalist seemed to also think that even casual contact with (eg, shaking hands) or walking past a gay person could cause him to catch the gayness biome.I would suggest that this is just yet another case of something and misapplying it wildly. And, yes, both sides have been guilty of doing that.Edited by dwise1, : Penultimate paragraph about a questionable conclusion that gayness could be contagiousEdited by dwise1, : Added reference to casual contact