January 2008
33 metre Jesus. →
A Slovak mayor wants to build Europe’s biggest statue of JC in his city of Presov in a bid to increase religious tourism to his city.
Wonder if he’s read Deuteronomy 5:8? “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in...”
– Thomas Jefferson
“Deaths in the Bible. God - 2,270,365 not including the victims of Noah’s...”
– Unknown.
Who you going to call? The Spirit Cop? →
A Canadian police officer is accused of pretending to be a black magic practitioner to get “false confessions” about a murder.
“Hypocrisy is better than no standards at all.”
– Conservative pundit Bill Bennett (also former US secretary of education, drug czar and author of “The Book of Virtues”) on CNN in 2001.
Pope warns of 'seductive' science. →
Wonder if he will discourage such seduction in the same manner as a previous Pope who had Giordano Bruno stripped, strung-up upside down and burned at the stake for pushing the scientific theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not vice-versa. Bruno is considered the first “martyr for science” and the anniversary of his death is coming up on 17th February. EDIT: The bit...
Then Man said "Let there be Life". →
US scientists have constructed the genome of a living organism.
Imagine what lies ahead for the humble school science fair?
Cruise the new Goebbels? →
A German historian has compared Tom Cruise to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels after viewing a recent Cruise video
I hadn’t realised that bad acting was one of Goebbels’ crimes.
“Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a...”
– L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, as quoted in David Marr’s article Sects, lies and videotape
Texas is number one! →
Polluter that is … C02 … Texas air.
Isn’t GW from Texas?
President that is … Iraq … quagmire.
The Darwin Report →
A blog covering the natural world in all its complexity and defending science from creationists and ID supporters. It’s also got some good coverage on the Huckster (Mike Huckabee).
Huckabee's inner fish. →
A new book by Neil Shubin about the discovery of a 375-million-year-old fossilized “fishpod” will throw up a few problems for presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee given that he doesn’t believe in evolution and may actually think the world is only 6,000 years old.
And Brigno is quite correct Huckabee is quite nuts but what is really nuts is that there are people out there that...
Scientologists "authorities on the mind"? →
Tom Cruise, of no scientific education, claims that Scientologists are authorities of the mind. And I think he might be right! How else could they con so many people into joining let alone handing over vast amounts of money; even the Catholic Church looks like a bunch of amateurs by comparison. At the end of the day you have to remember that this “religion” and its views on the...
Cheap Ethanol from Trash →
GM partners with a start up comapny Coskata which claims it can make cheap ethanol from wood chips, grass, trash and tires.
The obesity epidemic. →
Sorry randomacts but going “sugar free” might actually make you fatter! Stay away from those syrups!
Fearing the worst. →
Despite the fact that in Britain, as in most western countries, life is getting better, the majority of people refuse to believe it. Are the politics of fear and compliant media the reason or is it just something that is inbuilt in us to look at the dark side of things?
The decline of freedom. →
Is the dogma of free market, individualism, consumerism and religious extremism killing off freedom?
Stem Cells Created Without Harming Embryos. →
Scientists claim they have created stem cells colonies without harming the embryo from which the embryonic stem cells were taken. Of course they can’t really prove that the embryos weren’t damaged without transfering the embryos to women’s wombs and seeing if resulting babies are normal; which is of course unethical.
More: Published paper (PDF)
Court Ends Bible Distribution in School. →
A US federal judge has put a stop to the giving out of free Bibles in a fifth grade class, ruling it unconstitutional. The novel aspect to this story is that it was actually a group of Christian parents, and not those wicked atheists, that wanted the activity banned. This group believes that religion should be taught in the home and not in school. I’ll drink to that!
Man cuts off "Mark of the Beast"; then microwaves... →
An American man, with suspected mental illness issues, cut off his hand and then microwaved it because he felt it bore the “mark of the beast”.
Pope voices sorrow over Darfur crisis →
Maybe he should send in his Exocisim Hit Squads to do some real work against real evil in the real world.
A Tale of Two Countries. →
As an indication of the differences between Canada and the US you need to look no further than this recent poll. Canadians when asked if given the opportunity to vote in a US election who would they vote for, the Democrats won by a margin of four-to-one. Not sure the Dems would do so well in Australia, given we just wiped their Australian namesakes off the map at the federal level. Sticking my...
Start-ups pushing the electric car envelope. →
While the major car manufactures play around with the idea of a plug-in electric car a number of smaller start-ups are already producing them. Meanwhile other start-ups are working on the infrastructure to support a world full of electric cars.
'Iron my shirt!' →
Does anybody know if The Chaser team are in the USA right now?
Next Steps for Stem Cells. →
Recent breakthroughs in stem-cell research could lead to new cellular models that allow scientists to study disease with unprecedented accuracy.
Pope's SWAT squads. →
The Pope has ordered his bishops to set up exorcism squads. Apparently there is a rise in Satanism and the Pope wants to take out the competition.