March 2009 Archives

United Kingdom: Fred Phelps appears to not understand what is meant by the word "barred" and seems to believe that being banned from entry to the UK means that he will be able to picket a school in north east London next week.

A row broke out at George Tomlinson primary school in Waltham Forest, north-east London, earlier this month when some parents pulled their children out of lessons planned for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender history month. The school used books on homosexual relationships, in one case between two male penguins.

Members of the Westboro Baptist church in Topeka, Kansas – which has been the subject of a Louis Theroux television exposé – say they will picket the school next Friday afternoon.

Odds on, they're bullshitting to get attention, but we can dream of seeing them led away in chains and chucked into a detention centre before being deported on a plane chartered from Ryanair and full of drunk football fans.

What I don't understand is why Phelps is not allowed to enter the country, but another preacher of hate, with pretty much identical views on homosexuality, has been invited to visit the UK by the government.

Anti-gay US Christians threaten to picket London primary school—The Guardian, 20th March 2009.

I cannot better this headline, so here's a link to a story in Bartholomew's Notes on Religion: US Wingnuts Accuse UK Daily Mail of Being In Bed with Islamic Supremicists.

The neo-nazi British National Party has recently produced an anti-immigration poster. They chose to illustrate it with a Spitfire.

But RAF history experts have identified the iconic Romeo Foxtrot Delta Plane as belonging not to Britons but to a group of Polish pilots instead.

The plane was actually flown by the celebrated 303 Squadron of the RAF -- made up of Polish airmen rescued from France shortly before Nazi occupation.

A BNP representative could only come up with WE MENT 2 DU DAT, DUH, ONNIST GUV.

BNP uses Polish Spitfire in anti-immigration poster —Daily Telegraph, 4th March 2009.

Clonehenge is a blog with a mission:

Encouraged by an internet acquaintance of like mind, we began to search online for Stonehenge references and replicas. It was casual at first–just for laughs–a butter henge here, some biscuit henges there, and of course the well known ones like car henge and fridge henge and the modern stone “henges” scattered about the States. But after a bit the sheer number of ersatz henges [we use the word henge here, not in the true sense of a circular earthwork mound with a ditch, but in the sense that it is commonly if mistakenly understood, as a stone circle, often with lintels over some pairs of stones] filled us with a kind of horror-filled joy, and we decided something must be done.

Clonehenge is that something. It is a celebration of those first builders who erected Stonehenge as we understand it today, whose idea has turned out to be the ancestor of all icons, so powerful in image that five thousand years later people feel compelled to emulate their achievement, often in the most unlikely places and unsuitable media.

It is also a celebration of the ingenuity and mad genius of those people today who decide, usually for no reason except fun and the challenge, to make Stonehenges out of anything they can lay their hands on. Hurray for the builders!

They have already found most, though not all, of the usual suspects. The photograph is of one of my own creations, Beerhenge, made from two cans of Yebisu and a hip flask. As an added bonus that is, indeed, the summer solstice sunrise.

Amanda Gefter is a book reviews editor at New Scientist, and this week she has written her own guide to spotting bollocks disguised as science.

When you come across the terms "Darwinism" or "Darwinists", take heed. True scientists rarely use these terms, and instead opt for "evolution" and "biologists", respectively. When evolution is described as a "blind, random, undirected process", be warned. While genetic mutations may be random, natural selection is not. When cells are described as "astonishingly complex molecular machines", it is generally by breathless supporters of ID who take the metaphor literally and assume that such a "machine" requires an "engineer". If an author wishes for "academic freedom", it is usually ID code for "the acceptance of creationism".

In related news, 80% of the UK population disagree with creationism.