Jesus is Balding

At least he is if you look at this completely compelling photographic evidence:

Avatarded

MY SKIN IS BLUE YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID.

From what I’d read of the reviews of Avatar I really don’t have much to add. The aesthetics are very cool and make it worth going to see on its own. I was worried at first because the first 3D preview they showed just used basically flat background/foreground “3D” instead of the spectrum of depth as it’s supposed to be.

Vaccines and autism

Vaccines don’t cause autism.

If the mercury in Thimerosol or anything else caused autism, then we would expect to see higher mercury levels in autistic children than in children developing typically. But we don’t.

If autism were caused by preservatives in the vaccine, we’d expect older people who were vaccinated before these preservatives were added to not have it. But there are older people with autism.

Book Review: Pygmy, by Chuck Palahniuk

OK, first of all, this book is much better than his previous one, so those who were disappointed by Snuff and thought Palahniuk was in decline can probably write that off as an anomaly.

But Pygmy is written in a very different, Engrish-y style. And it’s relentless. It almost never stops. The only escape from the narrator’s voice is through other characters when they speak. And unlike other books with a lot of slang (A Clockwork Orange, Irvine Welsh), it’s not something you can just put aside and hope it all starts to make more sense as you go. You really have to understand what the narrator means to say by syncing yourself up with his way of thinking or else the plot will escape you completely.

Another argument atheists shouldn’t use

So this one is very common. It’s used often by Dan Barker, a former evangelical fundamentalist Christian turned atheist debater and co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Here’s how Richard Dawkins puts it in The God Delusion on page 53, just after a brief outline of Russell’s Teapot:

“I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.”

Prince Charles urges EU medical deregulation

England’s most famous welfare queen – besides the actual queen – is meeting with the UK’s health secretary to get him to cancel proposed EU medical regulations which would “crack down” (words of the Telegraph) on people who practice medicine without being registered to do so.

Imagine that! It’s like the EU wants to enter the 20th century already in this regard.