The Invisible Library

In a nice change of pace, I recieved this piece of spam from a website of a Muslim Creationist from Turkey, declaring simply:

Primitive Man never existed, and there never was a Stone age

And providing a link to the website of Harun Yahya (http://www.harunyahya.com/index.php)*. If you haven’t heard of Harun Yahya, he’s the pen name for Adnan Oktar:

Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Adnan Hoca) was born in Ankara in 1956 and lived there until he moved to Istanbul in 1979. He is one of the leading figures in Turkish creationism, and a fervent advocate of creationism in the creation vs. evolution debate. He is considered the leading Muslim advocate of creationism; unlike the majority of Christian creationists he subscribes to Old Earth creationism. He is an anti-zionist and anti-mason which he sees as very interrelated movements. Although he rejects allegations of anti-Semitism, claiming pagan and Darwinist roots for anti-Semitism [1] he is also credited as a Holocaust denier [2], with his book Soykırım Yalanı (The Holocaust Hoax).

[…] Oktar has written numerous books using the pen name Harun Yahya (Harun (Aron) and Yahya (John)), arguing against Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. He also argues that evolution is directly related to the claimed evils of materialism, nazism and communism. Most of his anti-evolution resources are identical to Christian creationist arguments and the scientific community have made identical critiques. [8]
He also has produced various works on Zionism and Freemasonry, accusing Zionists of racism and arguing that Zionism and Freemasonry have had significant negative effects on world history and politics. Finally, he has written more than a hundred books describing the morals of the Qur’an and faith related issues. Literally hundreds of books are credited to Oktar. Some claim therefore that others must have contributed to, or simply written, many of the books. This charge is adamantly denied on his web site; he claims sole authorship of all of the books.

[…] These books attempt to display for non-Muslims what Oktar claims to be signs of the existence of God, and the excellence of his creation. A sub-group within this series are the series of “Books Demolishing the Lie of Evolution”. The main purpose of these books is to attack the ideas of Materialism, Evolution, Darwinism, and atheism.

He even blindly attacks Buddhism for being a false religion built upon idolatry and falsehood […]

The covers of all of Oktar’s books bear the seal of the Prophet Muhammad. This seal is used on the Qur’an as an indication that the Qur’an is the last book and the last word of God, and the Prophet Muhammad is the last of His messengers. By taking this attribute of the Qur’an and the Prophet, Oktar claims that his books are the “last word” which will put a definite end to the arguments of his adversaries.

He makes all the usual mistakes that the ill-informed and ignorant make about Evolution and atheism: guilt by association (linking Evolution to Nazis, Communists, and whatever else enters his addled little mind), fringe science, The usual Social Conservatism and racism and offering it up in a nice frothy stew of mysticism and nonsense. And here I was hopping he would have something unique to add to the culture war. But unfortunately, he just borrows the same Christian Creationist screeds and substitutes the Christian names for Muslim mythological proper nouns.

Wikipedia links to some of his videos, in case you feel like a good chuckle.

Dr. Hawking, while a genius in Astrophysics and Cosmology needs to lay off the Star Trek:

The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

The British astrophysicist told a news conference in Hong Kong that humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years.

“We won’t find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system,” added Hawking, who arrived to a rock star’s welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out.

He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

Amada Marcotte’s response is much more pointed, so I’ll quote her:

Religious wingnuts have invented the Rapture to avoid talking about taking responsibility for the future of the human race (also to justify having more and more Virility Objects, i.e. children, even though the planet is suffocating from the massive explosion in wasteful human beings). Now Stephen Hawking has just put his authority behind an escape fantasy that allows wingnuts who aren’t Rapture fanatics to ignore the fact that we’re destroying our planet and very soon going to make in uninhabitable.

Chris Clarke shoots down the technical aspects of such a monumental brain fart, even bringing up the horrible memories of Biosphere:

And that was on this planet, where the designers could just have a thousand yards of specialized concrete and a million square feet of tempered glass driven up to the site on flatbed trucks. I suspect an attempt to replicate the Biosphere experiment in the Valle Marineris would be a bit more difficult. The construction crew here could actually breathe without tanks, for one thing, and what happens when the New Martians realize they have the wrong gauge turnbuckles for the shadecloth awning, and all the lettuce plants get UV poisoning? We’re talking about an agency that forgot to do a English-Metric conversion for an unmanned Mars probe here. Would you really trust them to buy compatible plumbing fixtures from 400 million miles away?

The heart of the matter though, as Amada points out, is that this is a sad example of escapist fantasy for geeks. Our current policies (and by our, I mean not just the US but China and Russia and everyone else as well) amounts to prolonged attempt to kill Planet Earth before it kills us. That is civilization in a nutshell.

By the time I’m an old man, global warming-spawned superstorms will probably have submerged the city where I was raised, my current home and turned Florida into a barrier reef. That’s the positive scenario. The bad version involves wars for the last bit of oil going nuclear, turning all our old Cold War fears into Hot World realities. Maybe if we adopt sensible ecological policies and implement new technologies, cooperate across international boarders to end our dependance on oil, then we’ll have the time and man-power to devote to Hawking’s wet dreams of living on Mars. But that’s an awful long way to go and we haven’t even started building that road.

Tristero reminds us that the Creepy Evangelical Video Game (Where you either convert or kill everyone in New York City) is not a product of some fringe White Supremacist Malita or some publicly disavowed wacko like Fred Phelps but a genuine article from the most vociferous of the Faithful:

[…] There is nothing about the worldview of this videogame that cannot be found in the writings and speeches of political operatives like Dobson, LaHaye, Robertson, Falwell, Rushdoony, and others in their milieu (here’s a paean to intolerance co-authored by James Dobson’s son. ). The particular balance of extremist positions varies to some extent among all these people, but the overall thrust is clear: they advocate replacement of a democratic American republic with a theocracy (Christian Nation)and the conversion or elimination of all non-believers.* The craziest of them - eg Rushdoony - are not merely cynical dirtbags trying to snatch every last nickel they can from ignorant rubes. The worst of them actually believe this stuff. But here’s the rub: even the less worse are willing to listen to the worse, and prominent politicians today are are also listening.

Troutfishing has all the skin-crawling details for those just tuning in:

The “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” videogame that lets players simulate converting to Christianity or killing the citizens of New York City has become a dead cow in the living room to leaders of the Christian right. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and The Southern Baptist Convention have not denounced the game and have refused to even comment on it

The best part though:

Tyndale House, which licenses “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” also publishes a book, by [infuriated Christian conservative attourney and activist, Jack ] Thompson, against videogame violence!

It’s easy to dismiss a Conservative Christian Publisher as being more about the Business of Publishing than the heartfelt lifestyle of a Conservative Christian, only out to make a fast buck exploiting the fear and loathing of the Evangelical market. But just keep in mind, that fear and loathing comes from a real source. And if there is one thing the faithful are good at, it’s inventing bogey men to exert control over their followers. If there’s two things they’re good at, it’s stirring the pot until it comes to a boil.

As usual, Warren Ellis is on to something:

I’ve long been interested in the chambara form, the Japanese stories of wandering heroic swordsmen. Chambara is a subset of what the Japanese called jidai geki, period drama. I bet you’ve all seen one of them — YOJIMBO, SEVEN SAMURAI, RAN. And you’ve all seen THE HIDDEN FORTRESS, though you know it better as the first STAR WARS film. George Lucas was, of course, a huge fan of Kurosawa.

It didn’t occur to me until I read this tidbit the other day that Lucas, […] in looking for his faded knights of dynasty, would have coughed and California-mispronounced jidai into Jedi…

This is hardly surprising. When not ripping off Kurosawa, Lucas was lifting straight out of John Ford’s films. But with every passing year another tidbit makes it into the stratosphere (and by stratosphere, I mean these here Internets) that Lucas was also padding his script with Jidaigeki tropes and Oh yeah, Joseph Campbell, too (wink). It’s only too bad he didn’t stick to ripping off Kurosawa and japanese mythology. Maybe then the prequels wouldn’t have sucked so bad. *

I’m still looking forward to the September release of the Un-Special Editions, maybe even more so, now that we know that Lucas had even less to do with them then we originally thought.

Catch terrorists before they hit their target.

Bryan sums up my feelings on the Canadian terror suspects arrested the other day:

Canadian Broadcasting has an update on the arrest of 17 people, 12 adults and 5 juveniles, in the plot to bomb targets in and around Toronto. They also have a background article on the plot. Six of those arrested will face explosive charges in the alleged plot.

[…] The Canadians have evidence, warrants, all that old fashioned police stuff, and they are taking people to court for trials. This is possible because they didn’t violate anyone civil rights. This is how it’s done in civilized countries that believe in the rule of law.

Had it been here in the US, we would have had half a dozen agencies all with different piece sof the puzzle and no one talking to one another. the local police would spend months trying to get the Feds to look at the evidence against these suspects only to have it be too late, and the FBI pencil in an hour to listen two days after they stormed FOX News and cut off Bill O’Reilley’s head.

The Mounties didn’t make any martyrs by going all Waco or Ruby Ridge; they simply followed the intelligence gathered, issued warrants, set up a sting and caught the suspects. Fucking amazing what happens when you treat terrorism as the crime that it is, and use law enforcement officers to enforce existing laws, instead of trying to scare the bejesus out of everyone by restructuring the Intelligence apparatus and tapping everyone’s phones.

Today is the day the world ends. Or else, it’s Tuesday, depending on how you wear your goggles:

The Number of the Beast is mentioned in the Book of Revelation of the Christian New Testament and has long been accepted to be 666 (or, in some cases, 616) *. The meaning of the number is debated. In some interpretations of Christian eschatology the “Beast” is believed to refer to a being controlled by or equated with the Antichrist, whereas some scholars, such as Dr. Delbert Hillers and the editors of the Oxford & Harper Collins translations, contend that the number is a code for the Roman Emperor Nero[1], a view that is also supported by the Roman Catholic Church [2].

it’s fascinating how some people get so worked up over a coincidental arrangement of numbers on a calendar. Global warming? Just a myth. But three (count ‘em!) three sinister 6s in a row on your Garfield desk calendar and it’s time to break out the Cabala tables and start thinking critically. Remember Y2K? Yeah, that was fun, wasn’t it? Idiots buying upa ll the toilet paper within three counties for fear that the world will end because our computers aren’t smart enough to add correctly.

But this is even more retarded because it isn’t based solely on ignorance of science or banal superstition. it’s also got two millennia of traditional superstition and ignorance backing it up That’s quite a shadow. But it still amounts to nothing more than people being scared of the dark.

Of course, George W. Bush is still in Office, and it is still early yet.

Orac has more, including a story about a woman so bone headed, she wants to induce early labour so as not to give birth to Satan.

I’m in Atlanta for Work for the next three days so posting will be light, as all I have is a work related Internet access (And you know how they are about blogging). I guess I can’t complain, as the school’s putting me and Elvira up for two nights for free. But still, a dorm with no wireless? That’s so… 20th century.

In early January 2006, a stranger called The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library to say that she had found some old cartoons tucked in a stack of boxes that had been sitting in her family’s business for decades. The caller wanted to bring her find to the library, and soon she arrived with a battered cardboard folio. When it was opened, a treasure appeared. Inside were original, hand-colored drawings from Winsor McCay’s first comic strip, A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle. Up to that moment, no original drawings of the strip were known to exist. The finder has asked to remain anonymous.

Until January 2006 none of the original drawings created by Winsor McCay had been seen for more than a century. The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library acquired five of the original hand-colored drawings which comprise this exhibit. Unlike other extant examples of McCay’s original comic strips, A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fidldle are hand-colored. Although the reason McCay painted them is unknown, it may be that since this was his first effort at a comic strip, he was unsure how engravers might follow his color instructions and wanted to be sure that his preferences were clear.

Link via Drawn! (Who have a bigger, hi res version of the picture)