The LA County District Attorney’s office has filed a felony vandalism charge against an online personality they said filed a fake police report and told authorities he had been beaten and attacked by three men in West Hollywood last June.
Calum McSwiggan, who is known for his online posts and videos, has been charged with vandalism for suggesting the men also damaged a Lexus which they said he damaged.
The DA said original charges were dismissed Thursday to make way for a newly filed felony case.
On Monday, the 26-year-old McSwiggan, pleaded not guilty to one felony count of vandalism over $400 damage and one misdemeanor count of [filing a] false report to a peace officer.
[…]According to the felony complaint, McSwiggan damaged the car mirror and bumper of a vehicle on June 27. The defendant then is alleged to have falsely reported to police that he had been beaten by the vehicle’s driver and two other men, the DA said.
McSwiggan had several broken teeth in the “attack” and said three men gay bashed him outside the popular bar, The Abbey. Officials said his wounds — he also needed stitches in his head — were self-inflicted. They said he used a pay phone inside the sheriff’s station to cause the damage to his face.
The defendant — a YouTube star and gay rights activist — faces a possible maximum sentence of three years and six months in county jail if convicted of the charges.
I’m sure that the lawyers at the Human Rights Campaign will be able to get him out of these charges, lest their noble cause be drawn into disrepute.
Let’s recall a few more recently committed fake hate crimes.
This one is from the radically leftist New York Times, of all places.
Excerpt:
The case of the chocolate cake slur, it seems, was simply a hoax.
An openly gay Texas pastor who had accused Whole Foods of defacing his cake with an anti-gay slur dropped his lawsuit against the grocery chain on Monday, issuing an apology that said he was wrong to “perpetuate this story.”
“The company did nothing wrong,” the pastor, Jordan Brown, said in a statement. “I was wrong to pursue this matter and use the media to perpetuate this story.”
[…]Mr. Brown’s apology represented a remarkable about-face from his remarks last month, delivered at a news conference alongside his lawyer, during which he choked back tears as he told the story.
[…]But a day after Mr. Brown’s legal salvo, Whole Foods denounced the pastor as a fraud, vowing to press a countersuit that sought $100,000. At the same time, the grocery chain released surveillance footage of Mr. Brown’s purchase that it said proved that the cake had not been tampered with.
I doubt that stories like these will be the basis of a plot on Glee or Will and Grace or the other TV shows that seek to change public opinion on gay rights issues. Or maybe Law and Order will do a show on it, but make it a real hate crime where some patriotic Christian homeschooling family actually does commit the hate crime.
I blogged before about several other fake hate crimes in this post, this post and this post. It happens a lot. It might be a good idea to assume that hate crimes committed against the secular left are false unless they are proven true. There is a lot of mental illness in the secular left crowd. A lot of attention-seeking. A lot of wallowing in victimhood and bullying others for sympathy.
I saved a copy of the post and the comments. Let’s look at some of the comments.
Comments by editors of the journal
Michael Sears:
The article should be retracted and the handling editor should be dismissed. As an Editor for this journal, I am appalled.
Ricard Sol:
I think that pretending to defend a creationist argument (non-science) in a science journal raises serious doubts about the whole enterprise. The paper should be retracted. As a PLOS ONE editor I believe accepting this situation would seriously damage our credibility.
Dante Chialvo:
[…]I am ashamed that the journal staff, the editor responsable for the paper, the reviewers, all ignored this more than obvious red flag resulting on a creationist argument embedded on a scientific paper. I will consider resigning unless exemplary actions are taken by Plos.
Angel Sánchez:
As I have said in a separate post, I will resign as an editor of PLOS ONE if this paper is not retracted immediately. PLOS ONE is a scientific journal and I don’t want to have anything to do, not even my name related to a journal tha publishes about superstition and supernatural entities. I will stop editing and I will stop submitting, and I’ll recommend everybody never to submit again to PLOS ONE. I hope we don’t have to go there.
So, you can see that science – as the naturalists conduct it – is not really the search for truth, no holds barred. It’s the attempt to explain nature without reference to a Creator and Designer. Whatever the experiments show must conform to a philosophical assumption (a religion), called naturalism. And the religion of naturalism determines what can and cannot be accepted as science. You can see the same principle at work in the denial of the Big Bang cosmology despite evidence such as the cosmic microwave background radiation, the light element abundances, and the redshifting of light from distant galaxies. Science has shown we live in a created universe that began about 13.7 billion years ago, but here we have atheists in denial of science sitting in positions of power deriding the Creator who has been revealed by experimental science. That’s the power of the naturalistic dogma. And it turns out that the most powerful argument for Darwinian evolution is this: “believe it, or I’ll have you fired, and ruin your career”. This is how Darwinism propagates from old to young – through coercion, and not through real science.
Other comments
Zach Throckmorton:
As others have noted, utilization of an intelligent design creationism framework for explaining human anatomy is not acceptable for a scientific journal.
Jorge Soberon:
I find the use of religious language in a scietific paper totally unacceptable. I will be watching this paper closely, and distributing it to colleagues. If PLOS ONE does not do something about it, like asking the authors to retratct the paper, or at the very least publishing an explanation, I will stop reviewing papers for PLOS ONE. I do hope the editors of PLOS ONE realize what a huge mistake was to accept publication of a paper with this wording. It says a lot about the care with which a paper is edited.
Adam Hartstone-Rose:
This article proves that there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with the journal. If the paper isn’t retracted, my students, collaborators and I will have no choice but to refrain from submitting to this once respectable journal. I’m embarrassed for you and embarrassed that some of my proudest papers are in your journal.
[…]This requires a ballistic reaction, not a considered “looking into” the problem!
Enrico Petretto:
This is outrageous. If PLOS ONE does not do something about it, i.e., ask the authors to retract the paper, and in any case, if the paper isn’t retracted, my students, collaborators and I will have no choice but to refrain from considering (i..e, reading, reviewing and citing) papers published in PLOS ONE.
Luigi Maiorano:
Quote totally!! outrageous is the minimum! I published 3 of my papers in PlosOne, but I will never do it again. I’m actually telling all my students and colleagues to boycott the journal and never consider it again!
Jean-Michel Heraud:
I have no knowledge to judge this article…
[…]I would recommend to the editor of the journal to exclude definitely the two reviewers that have accepted this manuscript.
Oliver Rauhut:
As noted by many comments below, this is not a matter of inappropriate wording! This rather seems to be a (successfull) attempt to place an intelligent design argument in a (so far) respected scientific journal. Thus, the only solution is the immediate retraction of this paper! Unless this step has been done, my workgroup and me will refrain from publishing further papers in PLoS!
Harry Noyes:
Changing Creator to Nature will not solve the problem since it still implies a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. That is there is no design process, no outcome is foreseen. Anything that works better tends to have a selective advantage but that is not a product of design it is a product of selection working on random events. The paper clearly needs a substantive rewrite quite apart from the concerns raised about the significance of the results raised by other comments.
Carl Schmidt:
A more important issue is the review process that allowed such nonsense as “Creator” to appear in a journal purportedly devoted to science.
This would seem to bear out a remark by Chinese paleontologist J.Y. Chen, recounted in Darwin’s Doubt, “In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.”
So what’s really behind all this fascism?
Consider this quote from famous population geneticist (and Darwinian fundamentalist) Richard Lewontin. And note that he equates science with his chosen religion of naturalism, he doesn’t accept science in the traditional sense of the word, where there is no metaphysical baggage.
He says:
Our willingness to accept scientific [i.e. – naturalistic] claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science [i.e. – naturalism] and the supernatural. We take the side of science [i.e. – naturalism] in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific [i.e. – naturalistic] community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science [i.e. – naturalism] somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
“Billions and Billions of Demons” by Richard Lewtontin. (Link)
“A priori” means before seeing the facts, before seeing the evidence.
And what is behind the choice of naturalism as the preferred religion? Consider this quote from atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel.
He says this:
“In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”
(”The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press: 1997)
The days of Isaac Newton are long gone, and another Newton will not emerge while the Naturalistic Church is in power. And it’s a taxpayer-funded church, too. Think about that next time you vote for bigger or smaller government.
Experimenting with cannabis on a casual basis damages the brain permanently, research has found.
It is far from being a “safe” drug and no one under the age of 30 should ever use it, experts said.
People who had only used cannabis once or twice a week for a matter of months were found to have changes in the brain that govern emotion, motivation and addiction.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School in America carried out detailed 3D scans on the brains of students who used cannabis casually and were not addicted and compared them with those who had never used it.
Two major sections of the brain were found to be affected.
The scientists found that the more cannabis the 40 subjects had used, the greater the abnormalities.
Around 10 million people in Britain, almost a third of the population, have used illegal drugs, with cannabis the most popular. The research author, Dr Hans Breiter, professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said: “This study raises a strong challenge to the idea that casual marijuana use isn’t associated with bad consequences. Some people only used marijuana to get high once or twice a week.
“People think a little recreational use shouldn’t cause a problem, if someone is doing OK with work or school. Our data directly says this is not the case.
[…]Mark Winstanley, chief executive of Rethink Mental Illness, said: “For too long cannabis has been seen as a safe drug, but as this study suggests, it can have a really serious impact on your mental health.
“Research also shows that when people smoke cannabis before the age of 15, it quadruples their chance of developing psychosis. But very few people are aware of the risks involved.”
I troubled by this study because I know people who act as if smoking marijuana were as much a right as free speech.
What I would really like to see is that people who insist on engaging in irresponsible behaviors then go on bear the consequences of that behavior. The problem is that it’s not only these people who are affected, it’s the innocent people around them. There are the innocent victims of car accidents or theft or the children who suffer because their parents want to “alter their brains”. Those are the people I am worried about.
WINTERY KNIGHT 