D. James Kennedy tries to look scientific

Remember the cigarette commercial touting a new filter in which a person in a white lab coat exclaimed You'd need a scientist to explain it? Are you familiar with all those television commercials that want to give their product some sort of air of scientific validity, so the scene shows what purports to be a science lab, with scientific-looking equipment all around? Well, I guess the Reverend D. James Kennedy, notorious fundie whacko, is familiar with them. In order to give his recent anti-evolution circus program such an air (more like a fetor) the Disingenuous Reverend opened with a scene inside a laboratory--with colored water boiling away in graduated cylinders.
Anyone who passed high school chemistry could have seen from this scene that this twit knows nothing about science.

A man who speaks out

Last night, listening to the CBC's broadcast of "As it Happens", I heard an excerpt from a speech by Stephen Lewis, UN special envoy for HIV-AIDS Africa given at the international AIDS conference. Those of you more familiar with the fight against AIDS may have heard Mr. Lewis speak up in the past.

Lewis's remarks can be found here. Here's the part I found rather remarkable for its directness:

Number 13: And while I'm on the issue of treatment, I am bound to raise South Africa. South Africa is the unkindest cut of all. It is the only country in Africa, amongst all the countries I have traversed in the last five years, whose government is still obtuse, dilatory and negligent about rolling out treatment. It is the only country in Africa whose government continues to propound theories more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state. Between six and eight hundred people a day die of AIDS in South Africa. The government has a lot to atone for. I'm of the opinion that they can never achieve redemption.

There are those who will say I have no right, as a United Nations official, to say such things of a member state. I was appointed as Envoy on AIDS in Africa. I see my job as advocating for those who are living with the virus, those who are dying of the virus - all of those, in and out of civil society, who are fighting the good fight to achieve social justice. It is not my job to be silenced by a government when I know that what it is doing is wrong, immoral, indefensible.

I think this may be somewhat redacted, but I was sleepy while listening to the CBC. I seem to recall him likening the South African fight against AIDS as feeding lemon juice and peanuts to the infected, or something like that. How I wish someone of influence would speak to our President and Congress like that.

Memorable quotes that didn't make it

I'm still reading through the piles of articles written about Kitzmiller v. Dover. An amusing aspect to doing this is that I know the outcome, which gives a different light on the articles than if I were reading them when current.

So now I chuckle as I'm reading an item by Michelle Starr in the York Daily Record about Michael Behe's upcoming testimony for the defense. Regarding that testimony, Dover attorney Robert Muise was quoted:

He's going to show it's science. He's going to clearly show it's science.

We all know how convincing Judge John E. Jones III found Behe's arguments.

Back to normal crackpottery

There are fewer letters to the editors of the local papers about Creationism, since the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial of almost a year ago. Things are getting back to normal. Which means there are still frequent letters exhorting the readership to obey the word of God (as the letter writers have received it and share it). Here's one from Mr. Floyd Eyler, a frequent contributor, that appeared in the York Daily Record. The writer appears to have confused himself with the prophet Jeremiah:

Isn't it great to live in new America, the land of unlimited freedom?

Freedom to legally kill unborn, unwanted children. Freedom from those hateful Ten Commandments in the public square. Freedom, in some areas, to marry anyone, regardless of gender. And a freedom to publicly burn the nation's flag - and on and on.

The problem is our sovereign God, who created all things, calls these freedoms abominations.

I must have attended one of those liberal Sunday schools, because they neglected to tell us how God told Moses, "Oh, and one more thing--thou shalt not burn any flags." Especially the flag that was created by God for His country. Then Mr. Eyler gets confused again, thinking he is Pat Robertson, and says:

But God has a zero tolerance of evil and one day will judge all these freedom-loving people who have rejected him and gone their own way.

History records the many times he has lowered the boom on nations that turn aside from him to follow their own devices. Do you really believe America won't suffer the same fate, if it doesn't repent and return to the Lord?

Don't you just hate those freedom-loving people? You know, the ones who rebelled against a king and adopted a Constitution to protect their freedoms?