Why do their arguments suck so bad?

Total buffoon

OK, Christians, have a go at me. Tell me your very best argument for the existence of a god. I just got an email that, instead of giving me an argument, listed the Top 20 Christian Apologists, as if I’m supposed to be impressed and cowed into silence.

Only problem is that I already know of most of these people, and most of their arguments, and they’re all terrible. Am I supposed to believe god exist because William Lane Craig, a confident debater with a brain the size of a pea, says, Everything that begins to exist has a cause; The universe began to exist; Therefore, the universe has a cause? That doesn’t even mention god, so who cares? I’m going to declare that the cause was hydrogen, because I’m not a physicist, and all I need to start nucleosynthesis and eventually chemistry is hydrogen. Is hydrogen god?

Anyway, here’s the list I was sent. It’s as fine a list of fools, grifters, and incompetents as you will find anywhere outside the Trump administration.

  1. Norm Geisler: normangeisler.com
  2. William Lane Craig: Reasonable Faith.org
  3. J. Warner Wallace: ColdCaseChristianity.com
  4. John Lennox: John Lennox.org
  5. Greg Koukl: STR.org
  6. Paul Copan: PaulCopan.com
  7. Ed Feser: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/
  8. Lee Strobel: Lee Strobel.com
  9. Josh McDowell: Josh.org
  10. Discovery Institute (Dembski, Meyer, Richards, Luskin, Wells): www.Discovery.org
  11. C.S. Lewis: CSLewis.org
  12. Gary Habermas: GaryHabermas.com
  13. Timothy McGrew: http://historicalapologetics.org/
  14. Dr. Michael Brown: AskDrBRown.org
  15. Richard Howe: Richardghowe.com
  16. Tim Keller: TimothyKeller.com
  17. J. Budziszewski: Undergroundthomist.org
  18. Hank Hanegraaff: Equip.org
  19. Hugh Ross: Reasons.org
  20. R. C. Sproul: Ligonier

I actually find myself quite angry that Christians think these are their best. Give up your religion if the very best argument you can find for it is a bunch of word salad and lies from a Lee Strobel or Norm Geisler or <ick> the Discovery Institute. Try and do better.

The end of The Daily Wire?

Does this man look like a far-right conservative advocate for manliness?

Maybe. He does have woman assistants posing to help him sell shaving products while their sterna are exposed. He is a weird, twisted macho man — that’s Jeremy Boreing, one of the founders of The Daily Wire, along with that shaved chipmunk, Ben Shapiro. He was responsible for that weird conservative “comedy”, Lady Ballers, that proposed that men would dress up as women en masse so they could form a whole basketball of “transgenders,” who would then win all their games. That’s Jeremy Boreing. Sexist, not funny, and with ambitions to make movies to support his conservative beliefs, because reality doesn’t do the job for him.

Say goodbye to Boreing, he’s out at the Daily Wire.

The Daily Wire is seemingly undergoing a rapid and dramatic implosion following the resignation of co-founder Jeremy Boreing.

According to a Twitter/X thread compiled by journalist James Li, the company has laid off roughly 25% of its workforce, including the complete shutdown of its kids division, and fired Alyssa Cordova, the vice president of public relations.

Cordova is alleged to have played a central role in crafting an aggressive and controversial PR strategy, which included stalking former employees online and maintaining dossiers on perceived enemies.

Internal sources blame Boreing’s leadership for the current crisis, claiming his departure should have happened sooner to prevent job losses.

With leadership in disarray and significant layoffs, questions loom about the future stability of The Daily Wire and its high-profile personalities like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles.

Oh yeah…Matt Walsh (“What is a woman?” he asks, since he doesn’t know) and Michael Knowles (sick little Catholic fundamentalist) all work there, too. Maybe they’ll be kicked off the gravy train soon.

Would you believe the Daily Wire had a kids’ programming division? They were making a knock-off of Bluey to inoculate children with conservative values. It’s going, too.

This is what happens when oil billionaires like Dan and Farris Wilks, who funded the Daily Wire try to force support for an unpopular agenda, rather than responding to popular interests organically. They flounder and fail repeatedly, and while the big money men might think the message is great, billionaires tend to be unimpressed with stuff that just costs them cash with little return.

Hey, let’s hope PragerU is next to decay.

Delete your data now!

Bad news: 23andMe has gone bankrupt and is up for sale. Who knows where all that data they store is going to end up? I sent in my saliva sample years ago, they’ve got my genetic sequence on file, and I hadn’t worried about it until now, but now I am concerned. So is Rebecca Watson.

Another issue that came to light in the past few years is how can a for-profit corporation remain solvent when they make all their money on a product that, by definition, a customer can only buy once? And that’s why today, the biggest problem everyone has is that 23andMe has, in fact, declared bankruptcy. And that means that if you’re one of their customers, your genetic data might end up in the hands of someone you don’t trust.

23andMe has stated that they’ll be protecting that data throughout the bankruptcy proceedings, but people are understandably skeptical of that considering that they already gave hackers access to the data for 7 million users a few years ago, giving up user passwords and allowing the hackers to see users’ family trees.

That’s why California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a consumer alert reminding people that the Genetic Information Privacy Act and the California Consumer Privacy Act give customers the right to demand that23andMe delete all their data and even destroy any samples they might still have on file. Obviously that’s for Californians, but it’s part of the reason why customers anywhere can in fact log in and do that, and Bonta gives step by step instructions for anyone who wants to.

Here’s the steps you can take to clear your data:

To Delete Genetic Data from 23andMe:

Consumers can delete their account and personal information by taking the following steps:
Log into your 23andMe account on their website.
Go to the “Settings” section of your profile.
Scroll to a section labeled “23andMe Data” at the bottom of the page.
Click “View” next to “23andMe Data”
Download your data: If you want a copy of your genetic data for personal storage, choose the option to download it to your device before proceeding.
Scroll to the “Delete Data” section.
Click “Permanently Delete Data.”
Confirm your request: You’ll receive an email from 23andMe; follow the link in the email to confirm your deletion request.

I’ve started the process for my data. However, there is an option to first request that they email your genetic data, and yes, I clicked on that…and it’s been 3 days, and I still haven’t received it. I think I’m going to have to cancel and just go ahead and delete everything without saving a copy. This is a comment that ought to chill you right down to the nucleus of all your cells: Charles Murray wants someone to buy the company for him, or his racist friends:

Charles Murray: Okay, my billionaire friends. $23m is pocket change! And it would make me so happy.

Nope, nope, nope. I’m going to have to kill my data fast.

Hey, I don’t have any billionaire friends. What have I done right in my life?

“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

Jay Bhattacharya is the new director of the National Institutes of Health. He says,

As NIH Director, I will build on the agency’s long and illustrious history of supporting breakthroughs in biology and medicine by fostering gold-standard research and innovation to address the chronic disease crisis.

Sure. Sounds great. How does he plan to accomplish that?

Effective pandemic preparedness.
Step 1: Fire all the people currently responsible for pandemic preparedness. They likely caused the pandemic, locked you down, kept your kids out of school, demolished economies, and want more power to do it again.

There is no step 2.

There may be more steps needed, but they will need to be devised by people not captured by pharma or the pandemic industrial complex.

NO STEP 2. Just fire everyone.

Monstrous

Israel has done it again. They are blatantly committing atrocities in their ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.

Some of the bodies of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, killed by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave nine days ago in Gaza, were found with their hands or legs tied and had gunshot wounds to the head and chest, according to two witnesses.

The witness accounts add to an accumulating body of evidence pointing to a potentially serious war crime on 23 March, when Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance crews and civil defence rescue workers were sent to the scene of an airstrike in the early hours of the morning in the al-Hashashin district of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.

Paramedics and rescue workers are not terrorists, but the Israeli soldiers who gunned them down are.

No more aid or military assistance to Israel, because that would be contributing to war crimes.

Secret group chats…in 2008

I know everyone is talking about the Signal chat where a bunch of warmongers stupidly invited the editor of The Atlantic to join in, but I have to tell you that these things are always insecure, and I have some personal experience with that.

Remember when the Expelled movie was a topic of conversation? They were doing all these press tours and radio interviews touting that stupid movie, and one of their events was a conference call in which the various people involved (Ben Stein, Mark Mathis, etc.) were calling in to promote the movie, and invited people to call in and listen to their propaganda. Well, I was involved, unfortunately, and I called in to hear what they were going to say, but accidentally found out how to join in, not just to listen, but to speak. I ‘hacked’ their system and crashed the event!

Some of you know that the producers of Expelled had a conference call this afternoon…a carefully controlled, closed environment in which they would spout their nonsense and only take questions by email. I listened to it for a while, and yeah, it was the usual run-around. However, I dialed in a few minutes early, and got to listen to a tiresome five minutes of Leslie and Paul chatting away, during which time they mentioned the secret code (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!) for the two way calls. I know. Sloppy, unprofessional, and stupid, but that’s the way they work.

So … I redialed. (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!)

Then I listened along quietly until I could take no more.

There were links about this, and even a recording of what I said in response to their nonsense, but it’s all dead links now, I’m sad to say.

Don’t trust the tech to protect your conversations! You never know when some nefarious rascal might eavesdrop.

Happy news from the state next door

I’ve been watching this race for the Wisconsin supreme court. It was a contest between a liberal (that is, sane) judge, Susan Crawford, and a conservative (that is, insane) judge backed by a Koch brother, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, and it was pretty much a demonstration of the power of rich people to buy elections. Elon Musk was actively campaigning for Brad Schimel, the right-wing wackaloon, throwing tens of millions of dollars at him and appearing at rallies, where he was awkwardly jumping to make a schlubby “X” shape, doing his usual inarticulate, stammering speechifying, and handing out million dollar checks.

It’s not just how much Musk and his groups have spent—more than any donor to a judicial election in US history—but how he has spent this money that makes Musk’s intervention in Wisconsin so alarming.

In addition to funding two dark money political groups that ran TV ads against liberal Judge Susan Crawford and sought to get out the vote for conservative candidate Brad Schimel, Musk resurrected a controversial scheme from 2024, paying voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges.” He then awarded Scott Ainsworth, a mechanical engineer from Green Bay, $1 million for signing the petition.

On the Friday before the election, he dramatically escalated this sketchy tactic, saying he would travel to Wisconsin to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” Unlike paying a Wisconsin resident to sign a petition, these million-dollar checks were contingent on someone actually voting. Legal experts quickly pointed out that Musk’s pledge violated the state constitution, which prohibits offering “anything of value…in order to induce any elector to…vote or refrain from voting.”

Musk backtracked, saying the money would only go to people who signed his PAC’s petition, holding a rally in Green Bay on Sunday where he hand-delivered two $1 million checks. The Wisconsin attorney general sued to stop him, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to intervene before the event.

This was criminal activity, but he’s a billionaire, so no one stopped him. He was openly and brazenly trying to buy an election, and nothing was done. This was particularly ironic, given that…

Republicans have been alleging for years that Democrats have been buying elections, usually with the help of liberal billionaires like George Soros. Indeed, election deniers, including Musk, widely promoted a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was “bought by Mark Zuckerberg” because an organization he funded directed election grants to blue areas to juice Democratic turnout. (In reality, it gave grants to both red and blue areas for routine election administration activities to help offset the Covid-19 pandemic.)

If this happened in any other country, the US would be quick to declare that the elections were corrupt…that is, if a pro-USA candidate didn’t win. Schimel also ran a dirty campaign, altering images of Crawford. It was an all-around disgrace to democracy.

But, good news: Crawford won!

Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford will win Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, CNN projects, maintaining the liberal majority on the court in a key battleground state less than three months into President Donald Trump’s second term.

Crawford, a liberal circuit court judge in Dane County, will beat the conservative candidate Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County judge who received Trump’s backing in the final stretch of the campaign. The race was officially nonpartisan, but Crawford’s victory will be seen as a bright spot for Democrats in Wisconsin and nationwide as voters handed the president’s preferred candidate a defeat in the first major political test of the second Trump era.

I’m wondering if one contributing factor to her victory was that the few remaining principled conservatives, if such a thing exists, must have been appalled at the spectacle. Patriotic Wisconsinites must have been embarrassed at the sight of this South African carpetbagger putting on a show. He looks so small and stupid.

Although, I must admit, I was hoping that my daughter or son-in-law, both Wisconsin citizens, might have been handed a million dollar check. Unfortunately, that big money give-away was rigged (of course it was!) and only MAGAs could win.

The dirty little secret of universities everywhere

The students don’t have any significant voice in the management of the university, oh heck no. It’s definitely not the faculty, either — they are allowed to contribute to strictly defined internal academic domains, but that’s it. The people who have real control over the resources of the university are the board of regents (at the University of Minnesota) or the board of trustees, as they are called at Columbia University. These are the people who actually call the shots, and generally they don’t participate in academic life at all.

The ultimate decision-maker at colleges and universities is the board of trustees. And these boards, as the explosive events of the past year demonstrate, have serious problems, both in how they are constituted and how they lead. Those committed to the distinctive strengths of the university as a maker, teacher and custodian of knowledge, both old and new, must at long last try to grasp why these boards are failing and figure out how to fix them.

Trustees (sometimes called governors, regents, visitors or “members of the corporation”) have a lofty function: to ensure the financial health and stability of the institution, partly through their own donations. This fiduciary responsibility has extended to the recruitment, appointment and retention of the school president, and sometimes of other senior administrators, usually (as at Columbia) with little substantive faculty consultation required by the norms of shared governance. Trustees play an increasingly active role in academic decisions through the levers of cost, donor power and financial austerity. In our fraught times, these levers are in increasing use, especially by the Trump-driven Republican party, to target disciplines, departments and individual professors. Many boards have become political wolves in the guise of fiduciary sheep.

Boards of trustees are essentially private clubs, which follow their own, always confidential, norms to determine who is asked to join, who controls key committees, and who is gently persuaded to resign when they do not meet the criteria of the most influential trustees. (In some private institutions, presidents may have a say in who gets selected as trustees, but presidents themselves are appointed by trustees.) At public universities, these boards are directly tied to the powers of state legislatures and administrators and thus are at the mercy of state politics in key matters. At private universities, the club is dominated by heavy hitters in business, law and technology; the number of alumni, academics and students is vanishingly small. These business-oriented trustees (a majority being white and male) treat their board meetings as golf parties; they schmooze, network and discuss deals while going through the motions of discussing university policies and priorities.

I think I’ve met a regent at the University of Minnesota maybe twice. They generally aren’t at all interested in professors, and students even less. As the linked article explains, this is a real problem: there is a deep gulf between what universities do, and who gets to pull the strings. They’re mostly CEOs, lawyers, hospital administrators, bankers, retired politicians, that sort of thing.

Who becomes a trustee? At Columbia there are 21, all of them from business, law and technology, with the exception of a former journalist. Although they are in charge of an academic institution, none of them is an academic. None has ever led a classroom or a lab meeting or medical rounds with interns. None has gone through the process of tenure, where their teaching, publication record and service are rigorously assessed by colleagues in the field both from within the institution and outside it. None has ever had their work peer-reviewed by anonymous readers or panels of experts. None has ever published in academic or scientific journals or presses and had their ideas debated in the public sphere. None has ever framed a hypothesis and tested it on the basis of evidence they have collected. None, in short, has sought truth and had their search confirmed by objective scholars and scientists.

The University of Minnesota isn’t quite that bad, but almost; I think we’ve got one emeritus faculty on there. In general, though, they are moneyed people with deep financial interests, not scholarly experience. Here in Minnesota they are all volunteers, and are not paid for their services, which does make me wonder why they are doing this at all. It’s a mystery. I don’t like being managed by rich people with mysterious motives, but that’s where we’re at. Especially when they mostly look conservative and Republican.

This is a problem everywhere.

The Columbia board is by no means unique. The same situation prevails, with few exceptions, across the Ivy League and its peer institutions (exemplary is the University of Chicago). As far as public universities are concerned, though there are some variations among several of the flagships, such as the regents of the universities of California, Michigan and Wisconsin, they are typically composed of lawyers, politicians and businessmen, and generally appointed by governors of individual states. Their accountability is hard to locate in their charter documents, and their near-autonomous powers are wide-ranging. In these regards, they are very much like their private counterparts./p>

There is a fantasy solution proposed. Balance the CEOs on boards with professors and students, to realign the values of the university.

The most urgent need today, as the Columbia case shows, is to create a new social contract on boards of trustees, who have become too craven to be watchdogs and too self-interested to be trusted. This change will require hard community-based activism that balances lawyers, hedge fund managers and tech bros with professors, schoolteachers, researchers, scientists and students. For public institutions, this may require legal support, as well as a powerful alliance between communities and state governors. Without such changes in boards of trustees, the current capture of colleges and universities by an unholy alliance of wealthy alumni, rightwing billionaires and bureaucrats is likely to become entrenched.

Creating this new social contract will require two crucial steps. The first is to bring the full force of public scrutiny to bear on boards, their membership, their accountability and the checks on their powers. The second is to demand that all academic governing boards both reflect and defend the fundamental values of universities in a liberal democracy: freedom of academic speech, opinion and inquiry; procedural transparency; and demographic diversity.

Nice. Although I had to laugh: the regents/trustees have all the power and complete autonomy, so how do we convince them to surrender some of their power to the people they govern? Shall we ask them nicely? I guess we could demand, but all they have to do is say “no.”