Apocalypse redux: world to end on Friday, October 21st

This is excellent news: I’m on vacation until Friday, so now I won’t have to go back to work on Monday.

From here:

Doomsday preacher Harold Camping was left a laughing stock when his prediction that the world would end on May 21 failed to materialise.

But the 90-year-old Californian may well have the last laugh after revealing that date was in fact Judgment Day – a spiritual moment when the righteous would be chosen – and simply a warm-up for the Rapture which happens exactly five months later.

This means that Friday, October 21, will mark the start of the Apocalypse – when believers will be whisked away into heaven and hell will be unleashed on earth.

[…..]

Bed-ridden Camping, who suffered a stroke soon after ‘Judgment Day’, said: ‘We can be sure that the whole world [will be annihilated] on 21 October 2011.’

North Wales police get rainbow stickers

From here:

A police force yesterday announced it would be placing rainbow stickers on the front desks of police stations in order to make gay and lesbians feel more confident about reporting crime.

North Wales police said it hoped that displaying the rainbow would make the gay, lesbian and transgender community feel safer and less apprehensive about talking to officers, especially if reporting homophobic offences.

And that’s what policing in the UK is all about now: homophobia. Burglary, murder and looting are so yesterday.

 

Occupy Canada is coming, apparently

On Saturday. The CBC tells us that it is the harbinger of an economic awakening and:

Canadian organizers are revving up their plans for the Occupy Wall Street-conceived global action day, the most adventurous idea yet for a movement that some experts say has the potential to trigger a major shift in the economic thinking of governments and big corporations.

Here we can see some of the organisers. I think I spot a couple of Macbook pros, a Macbook, a Dell and an HP laptop, all brought to the anti-big-corporation occupiers courtesy of big corporations.


I was planning on attending, but have decided instead to experience my economic awakening in the comfort of my study where I can savour the onset of a new epoch of halcyon accord without distraction.

It feels like the ’60s again.

Amnesty International wants Canada to arrest George W Bush

From here:

Amnesty International wants the federal government to arrest former U.S. president George W. Bush when he visits British Columbia next week.

Alex Neve, Amnesty Canada’s secretary general then went on to make the understatement of 2011:

Neve conceded that arresting a former president would likely cause tension with the United States

In contrast, when the murdering madman, Muammar Gaddafi wanted to drop in to Canada, Amnesty was completely silent, leaving it to Stephen Harper to officially protest.

Any smattering of integrity that Amnesty International might have once possessed has long since dissipated and, in this latest foolishness, Amnesty has confirmed its compulsive asininity and irrelevance.

 

Over-60s safe sex class cancelled over lack of interest

From here:

The free session, called Generation Sex, was being run by Portsmouth City Council with the aim of encouraging older people to practise safer sex.

Organisers said participants would be able to have frank and honest discussions about the realities of sex for the older generation.

But the workshop, set to have been held on Wednesday, has been cancelled.

A council spokeswoman said: “Sorry to disappoint but the sex over-60s event has been cancelled due to lack of interest.”

[….]

The council said proof of age and Portsmouth residency would have been required by those attending.

The reason for this could be: those over 60 are not interested in sex; those over 60 are not interested in safety; those over 60 who don’t already know what safe sex is are no longer with us; or – and this is my bet – sexagenarians who don’t already know what safe sex is can’t produce a proof of age because they don’t know what that is either.

Christopher Hitchens in his foxhole

Christopher Hitchens received the “Richard Dawkins Freethinker of the Year” award on Saturday, partly, I suspect, for staunchly maintaining his rejection of God while staring death in the face.

Fairly recently I had a long discussion with a young friend who has just emerged from years of university theological training. He is a universalist (he wasn’t before entering university), believing that all will eventually be saved: anyone confronted by the living God after death, he maintains, would be sufficiently overwhelmed that they would accept salvation – which would come through Jesus Christ. No amount of protesting that this would remove a person’s God-given free will would budge him.

In the case of a person like Christopher Hitchens who is determined to reject God come what may, universalism definitely can’t work since, for Hitchens, being compelled to inhabit heaven with God would be… hell.

From here:

During the convention, Dawkins praised Hitchens for his continuance of atheism even in the face of death and for proving that there were indeed, “atheists in foxholes,”….

[….]

“We have the same job we always had,” he told the crowd, “to say that there are no final solutions; there is no absolute truth; there is no supreme leader; there is no totalitarian solution that says if you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you would simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss can be yours.”

If, as Hitchens says, there is no absolute truth then the rest of what he had to say in that last paragraph can’t be absolutely true, including the very next thing he says: there is no supreme leader.

St. Francis in Wall Street

The religious left, in the form of Jim Wallis of Sojourners, is hastening to bestow its benediction on the Wall Street protestors who, it seems, are following in the footsteps of St. Francis.

From here:

Religious Left icon Jim Wallis has announced he will conduct a visitation to the occupiers presumably to bestow his blessing and, he doubtless hopes, to receive their homage.

[….]

A prominent Wallis acolyte is pacifist Evangelical Left activist Shane Claiborne, who likened the Wall Street Occupiers to St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day is this week.

Brother Shane has a point. As I recall from “The Little Flowers of St. Francis”, one of his first acts on becoming a Christian was to remove all his clothes and present them to his wealthy father. Here is a worthy Wall Street follower doing the same:

And here is another acolyte defecating on a police car. I will have to reread “The Little Flowers of St. Francis”, since I can’t quite recall where that was mentioned.

 

A neutrino walks into a bar

“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar.


Why? Because you can’t have neutrinos getting kicked out of taverns they have not yet entered.

From here:

The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the Euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana.

I am talking about something far more important. Which is why it made only the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all. Scientists at CERN (the European high-energy physics consortium) have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light.

[….]

It means that the “standard model” of subatomic particles that stands at the centre of all modern physics is wrong.
Nor does it stop there. This will not just overthrow physics. Astronomy and cosmology measure time and distance in the universe on the assumption of light speed as the cosmic limit. Their foundations will shake as well.

Something to note about this is that, much as the new atheists would try to convince us that science is the only means of establishing the truth of something, in actual fact science never completely settles the truth of anything.

Science has never pretended to illuminate purpose, meaning or answer the question “why?” Worse than that, since new scientific theories on the mechanics of the universe frequently overturn all prior theories, the notion that it reveals the truth in any satisfactory way is also something of a pretention.

If science has never given a final answer to anything, there is no convincing reason to suppose it ever will. What it does do is produce a never ending stream of models that approximate the object of study to lesser or greater extents.