CBEB’s

Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton has not one, but two, posts up about sports commentators causing controversy. I’m reminded of this brief piece - that evidently went unnoticed by the Guardians of All that is True and Right - by Max Kellerman on Tucker Carlson’s show. They’re discussing a Pay-per-View event where a seance will be held to conjure up the spirit of John Lennon.

A lot of people find Max Kellerman obnoxious. At times, I’m one of those people. Nevertheless, Max brings a youthful enthusiasm to the sport of boxing, and he’s a guy that recognizes that the sport is about the fighters in the ring, not the talking heads giving the commentary. When he co-anchored ESPN2’s Friday Night Fights, there was a running joke when it came time to make predictions for upcoming bouts. Bob Papa and Teddy Atlas would always make Max go first, then they would pick the exact opposite of him.

I was going to post a review of the Criterion Collection’s Special Edition of Fritz Lang’s M, but while dicking around on the web I was reminded of the shocking true story of a child killer that hits close to home.

Back in September, 30 year-old Hannah Overton was convicted of the capital murder of her four year-old foster son, Andrew Burd, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

This is an extremely condensed version of the Hannah Overton case: Andrew Burd died on October 3, 2006 after being forced to drink two cups full of water mixed with salt, pepper, chili powder and cajun seasoning. After Andrew threw up from drinking the mixture of water and spices, he stopped breathing. Hannah Overton did not call for an ambulance. Instead, she called her husband, Larry, who came home from work. The Overtons waited over an hour before taking their foster child to get any sort of help. By then, of course, it was too late.

The details of the case are complex; Andrew Burd was what would be considered a “special needs” child. He supposedly had ADHD, an eating disorder and some severe behavioral problems. For example, in the days before his death, Andrew slept on a bed made of plywood because he defecated in his bed and smeared it around on the sheets. Furthermore, there were some heavily disputed allegations of physical abuse made during the trial. Defense experts say that the bruises came from CPR and hypodermic needles while the child was being treated by doctors; prosecution witnesses said otherwise. There was also some head trauma involved, with the defense claiming it had occurred in an earlier traffic accident.

I’m by no means one of these people who immediately shuts off their brain and reacts on a purely emotional basis when it comes to children. Given more facts, I could probably agree that Hannah Overton’s sentence is a bit severe, but I’m not going to lose any sleep knowing that she’s going to spend the rest of her life in prison.

However, there are a bunch of people who disagree with me. I find it odd that the first group of people to fall back on the “won’t somebody think of the children?” argument are the very same people who want us to forget that a four year-old child died.

Yes, I’m talking about Christians.
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(Tip of the headgear to Bob O’H at AtBC)

Slimy Sal Cordova is back, and he brings big news. Creationist Intelligent Design Proponent Dr. Caroline Crocker - one of the “stars” of Expelled - has been named Executive Director of the IDEA Center.

Bob O’H pointed out the nifty Links section at the IDEA Center’s website. I say “nifty” because the links are given ratings so the reader will know what they’re getting into before they click their mouse. For example, their own website gets 4 stars, as does the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design’s website. Although Sal’s Young Cosmos site and Dembski’s Uncommon Descent are missing from the links, down in the two-star ghetto of ID links is Denyse O’Leary’s Post-Darwinist blog. Denyse’s propensity for spamming the internet with her poorly-written bullshit is euphemistically referred to as “regular and witty updates”.

The real find, however, is all the way down at the bottom of the list, the only one-star site in the ID links: Intelligent Design Theory. idtheory.org is described thusly:

This site doesn’t have a lot on it yet, but it appears that sometime soon it might have a large number of resources including, featured authors, books, and examples of irreducible complexity!

If you actually clicked on the link, you’re probably not surprised. “This site doesn’t have a lot on it yet” is quite the understatement. Plenty of links to long distance carriers, but if you’re looking for the elusive theory of Intelligent Design, look elsewhere. My guess is that it’s hiding under that list of researcher-verified ID predictions that William Dembski claims to have.

Poor idtheory.org, just sitting there being neglected. Maybe Dembski would be willing to trade his newly-minted teleocentric.com domain for idtheory.org. He better snap it up before the Raelians get their hands on it. It would suck for Dembski if someone put forth a theory of Intelligent Design that didn’t give full credit to the Baby Jesus.

Not that there’s any short supply of Tard at the moment, but I’ve been wanting to expand the focus of this blog a little bit and after writing about Sherry Shriner, Denyse O’Leary and Timothy Birdnow all in the space of less than a week, I could use a healthy diversion.

Here’s some random Top 5 lists for your reading enjoyment…

Top 5 Favorite Movies:

1. The Third Man
2. Treasure of the Sierra Madre
3. Robocop
4. Fritz Lang’s M
5. Goodfellas

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Timothy Birdnow, he of the “Where are the giant mammaried mosquitos?” fame, apparently never learned his lesson. The lesson that everyone else learned from the affair is that Timothy Birdnow is one of the most ignorant people on the face of the earth when it comes to discussing biological evolution, but poor Tim is still as clueless as ever.

Birdnow’s blog is, for the most part, an unreadable love letter to Jack Kemp with a dash of “THE BROWN PEOPLE ARE COMING!!!!ONE!” paranoia thrown in. I like to think of it as Little Green Footballs for the Lawrence Welk crowd. However, a few days ago Birdnow removed his puckered lips from Jack Kemp’s sphincter long enough to post an incredibly succinct bit of idiocy.

Birdnow linked to an amazing piece of well-poisoning at News With Views - a site that can only appeal to those who think Worldnet Daily is a cesspool of America-hating liberalism - concerning “Darwin Day“. The author, Sharon Hughes, apparently didn’t get the memo that creationism and Intelligent Design are two different things (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). As she rants about the evil atheists, she asks, rhetorically:

Could these, and other such worldviews, be a force behind the battle over allowing creationism to be taught in schools? Yes, I think so.

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I’ve added a few blogs to the blogroll; some of them might be familiar to you, while some might be new to you.

Science After Sunclipse: “A blag for math, physics and the New Enlightenment“. Lots of good science and anti-woo blogging.

Notes From Evil Bender: “poetry, politics, reason, morality“. I’ve seen the name Evil Bender around on some of the blogs I read, but it wasn’t until looking into Denyse O’Leary’s recent Tardfest that I saw his blog. Plenty of interesting stuff to see.

Law Evolution Science and Junk Science: “Weblog exploring Intelligent Design, other pseudo sciences, junk science and the abuse of science in law, generally“. This blog has some great snark directed at the Discovery Institute, Uncommon Descent and the rest of the usual suspects.

Deep Thoughts and Silliness: “Proof that absurdity lives“. The official blog of AtBC regular and occasional CBEB’s commenter Bob O’H.

Bitch Spot: “Yelling at the world, one topic at a time“. Atheism, Politics, Gaming, Movies, and more. It looks to be a fairly new blog, but it’s updated frequently.

Just a reminder… while my blogroll policy isn’t as liberal as Jon Swift’s, if you have a blog that deals with atheism and/or the evolution/cdesign proponentsists debate and would like to be on CBEB’s guest list, let me know. As long as your blog is updated on a semi-regular basis, I’ll add your blog to the roll. I’m going to add an “Other Venues” category to the blogroll, too, so eventually non-church burnin’ ebola spreadin’ blogs will be listed.

Tip of the headgear to afarensis, via AtBC:

Greg Laden at ScienceBlogs is reporting that scientists have figured out a way to disarm the Ebola virus.

a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has figured out a way to genetically disarm the [Ebola] virus, effectively confining it to a set of specialized cells and making the agent safe to study under conditions far less stringent than those currently imposed.

Great news for Africans and scientists, but it could be the death of CBEB’s. Church Burnin’ ‘epatitis Blog? Church Burnin’ Evilutionist Blog? Whatever shall I do?

*Explanation here.

If anyone hasn’t yet read The Weeping Deity, check it out. I want to add it to my blogroll, but I’ll have to first decide in which category it belongs.

Good work, Sebastian R.!

Several bloggers have been all over Denyse O’Leary’s Nine Predictions for ID, which has produced the - no pun intended - predictable result of Granny Spice spamming the Worldwide Web with cries of how the materialists are so mean to her.

In all fairness to St. Denyse of Leary, Patron Saint of Link Farmers, I will concede that one of her predictions did, in fact, come true. Qouth Denyse:

I notice where several Darwinists want me to understand that I am not much good at making predictions. Well, I have news for them. Back in 2001, I predicted that intelligent design would be BIG news by mid-decade, while some Darwinist or other was prophesying its death every six months.

Denyse’s prediction is a lot like the prediction I made back in 2001: The 80s hair metal band Great White will be BIG news in 2003. Hey, I didn’t say they’d be selling out arenas or getting Grammy nominations… I just said they’d be BIG news.

And so it is with Denyse’s prediction. What was the BIG news about Intelligent Design in the middle of this decade? Let’s see… was it that Nobel Prize that William Dembski won? No, that can’t be it; the Nobel Committee doesn’t give out awards for being a douche. Maybe it was that paper recently published by the Journal of ISCID, Progress in Complexity, Information and Design. That’s not it, either; ISCID hasn’t published their journal since November of 2005. Hmm… 2005 is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the decade… what else happened in the ID world in 2005? Ah, now I remember… WATERLOO!

Google Trends graph showing just how spot on Denyse’s prediction was.

Let’s give Denyse O’Leary credit for making a correct prediction, folks. ID was, indeed, BIG news mid-decade. And all you mean old Darwinists who keep “prophesying” ID’s death… just stop it, will you? You might as well start predicting that Elvis Presley will die on August 16, 1977.

Her prognostication skills being criticized isn’t the only thing that has Denyse in a tizzy. She wants the whole world to know that she only has two blogs.

But you know, Darwinists are not always as smart as they could be. The last time I had this much traffic, I seem to recall that some Darwinist was making a big deal of the fact that I have two blogs. Like why? WHY? I guess that individual doesn’t go in for reading blog hedders because the answer was right up there in the hedders. The Post-Darwinist supports By Design or by Chance? and The Mindful Hack supports The Spiritual Brain. Usually a new story will fit better into one lineup than another. But I guess you’d have to be the sort of person who reads blog hedder copy to know that.

She wants the whole world to know this so badly that she didn’t post it at her two - and only two - blogs, she posted it at The Weblog of William Dembski, Denyse O’Leary and Friends, Uncommon Descent. I realize that Denyse probably doesn’t need to match my pathetic level of detail, but I would think that the best way to argue that you only have two blogs is to post your argument on one - or even both - of your two blogs. Posting your argument on a third blog with your name in the header is what is known in the publishing business as “making yourself look stupid”. To top things off, she posted the exact same crap at yet another blog, The Word Guild (or Canadian Authors Who Are Christian, depending on how you read blog hedder copy).

It really doesn’t matter if Denyse O’Leary has two blogs or two hundred blogs. In my blogroll are three blogs all operated by the same person. I can visit each one of these blogs and find unique content, with no “today at UDOJ” advertisements. Furthermore, Orcinus, another blog I read on a regular basis is run by David Neiwert, who occasionally writes guest pieces at other blogs. So why is Granny Spice singled out? It might be attributed to the fact that she posts the same poorly-written crap over and over and over again at every available opportunity. Reading Denyse O’Leary’s blogs is like channel-surfing late at night and finding nothing on but infomercials… and each informercial is advertising another informercial on another channel. In other words, it’s a Möbius strip of Tard.

But Denyse shouldn’t think we’re being mean to her. If I wanted to be mean to her, I’d say something like her co-blogger DaveScot said:

P.S. if my dog was as ugly as the Canadian cross dresser I’d shave his ass and teach him to walk backwards.

Denyse should look at the hoots and howls of her readers as terms of endearment, sort of like the way fans will spit on a punk band as a way of saying “good show!” She’s the Jean Teasdale of Intelligent Design bloggers and I, for one, hope she never changes.

Yesterday at ERV, Abbie posted some info about traffic at her site coming from Uncommon Descent. Bottom line… there is none. In the comments, she also posted a really fun link: Blog Reactions to Uncommon Descent. It’s a great indicator as to who’s reading Creationism’s Intelligent Design’s premier blog.

It’s probably moved off the first page by now, but little old me was there and I had to laugh at my authority ranking of 3. In reality, this blog has an authority of 0, since my ranking of 3 comes from links at my old blog.

I went ahead and signed up for a Technorati account and started adding the links in my blogroll to my Technorati favorites. For shits and grins I even added a few of the ID blogs to my favorites. I’m pleased to be FtK’s first (and only) fan, but since I’m persona non grata at (un)Reasonable Kansans, someone else needs to tell her that she should do something with her Technorati profile, as it’s showing that she hasn’t updated her echo chamber blog in 2 weeks… or 6,000 years, depending on how you interpret the evidence.

If you’ve got a Technorati account, be sure to add Uncommon Descent, (un)Reasonable Kansans and a dozen or so of Denyse O’Leary’s blogs to your favorites. Let them know who their audience is, so they’ll keep providing quality entertainment.