Dawn of the Dumb

bakker.jpgJim Bakker is back.

Remember Jim? Jim of “Jim and Tammy Faye”? The Heritage USA televangelist who diverted millions in donations from hapless Christian faithful to his own wallet? For which he was convicted and spent five years in prison?

He’s risen again to swindle a whole new generation of victims with the same old god-game scam. And here’s the corker: His victims from before have returned, convinced that the whole thing was a mean-spirited plot against poor misguided Brother Jim. 

Doesn’t stop him from scamming them for donations, though.

Jim Bakker waits 41 minutes into his one-hour show to make his plea.

He begins by noting they have been off the air for six weeks.

“We have really gotten behind financially,” he says, fingering a crease in his khakis. “So we really need a miracle. The cost of moving, just to get the stuff you need — and we needed to get a few more microphones, we didn’t even have enough time to get the bugs worked out of things. It just takes a lot of money.”

He is talking directly to the camera now. He says he has a music CD for “a love gift of $30” and a DVD about marriage for a $55 donation. He decides to offer a recording of his sermon about prison, just $20.

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Fractal Wrongness

fractals.jpgDang, I wish I could take credit for this idea. It’s something I just came across last week, and I finally got around to posting on it.

Fractal Wrongness:

The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person’s worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person’s worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person’s opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.

If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet–in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums–your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time.

The Brassican Heresy

broccoli.jpgWarning: The following post is long, and may contains insults to French people. And Christians. And probably frogs.

(Also, it underwent a slight editing, with some additional material, on Feb. 11.)

______________________________

I’d like to propose to you a daring hypothesis.

You may be surprised by it. You may be stunned. You might even be shocked. Because this is such a daring idea, some of you reading this right now may actually be horrified. There’s even the possibility – distant, but real, so I have to warn you – that one or more people about to read the following hypothesis will suffer deep psychological damage and end up under permanent psychiatric care, or possibly even comatose.

I don’t really want to just spring it on you suddenly. This is something so new, so different, so deeply significant, that I feel very strongly that it should have its own screen. It’s just not something I feel okay with plopping down in a sea of insignificant words, as if it were one common grain of sand on a vast beach.

This is something so special it demands treatment you’d immediately consider … unusual.

So. If you think you’re ready for it, brace yourself and look below the break. Here it comes:

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