A smear

The religious right's new cause celebre- perhaps to be aborted by the DeLay collapse- is or would have been Eric Pianka.

I heard Limbaugh- serial liar- conflating airborne evolution of ebola virus with germ warfare.

These people are absolutely shameless...it needs to be addressed though with sincerity, but also with how one becomes sincere, and how one does that in an age of rank dishonesty.

I know a "conservative" who actually believes that Limbaugh does not "lie intentionally." Which is kind of naive to me- a paid Republican party propagandist and demogogue is not an intentional liar?


Meanwhile, I hope Eric Pianka and others sue Limbaugh and others like Dembski for slander. It'd be about time. I'd wish Michael Schiavo had done that too; and maybe he still will.

More on Pianka at Pharyngula here, and especially here.

That includesPianka's own words on the topic:

If humans do not control their own population (and we seem unwilling and unable to do so), then other forces will certainly act to control our population. The four horseman of the apocalypse (conquest, war, famine, and death) are all candidates. Most likely, lethal virulent microbes like HIV and Ebola zaire will set limits on the growth of human populations. HIV, by allowing infected hosts to survive years while they spread the virus and infect new hosts, has already become a pandemic, but it will be years before it decimates the human population. Although Ebola kills 9 out of 10 people, outbreaks have so far been unable to become epidemics because they are currently spread only by direct physical contact with infected blood. However, a closely related virus that kills monkeys, Ebola reston, is airborne, and it is only a matter of time until Ebola zaire evolves the capacity to be airborne.

And here:

Dr. Pianka was named the 2006 Distinguished Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. He's an ecologist, a "doomsday ecologist" as he puts it, with a CV several pages long and results that have changed the way ecologists think, forever. And damn is he ever entertaining to listen to.

Dr. Pianka's talk at the TAS meeting was mostly of the problems humans are causing as we rapidly proliferate around the globe. While what he had to say is way too vast to remember it all, moreover to relay it here in this blog, the bulk of his talk was that he's waiting for the virus that will eventually arise and kill off 90% of human population. In fact, his hope, if you can call it that, is that the ebola virus which attacks humans currently (but only through blood transmission) will mutate with the ebola virus that attacks monkeys airborne to create an airborne ebola virus that attacks humans. He's a radical thinker, that one! I mean, he's basically advocating for the death of all but 10% of the current population! And at the risk of sounding just as radical, I think he's right.

Inevitable, I'd say; perhaps not an advocacy, but inevitable.