So how is your trans-species present-shopping list doing? Natalie Angier has tips.

For the female scorpionfly: an extremely large, glittering, nutrient-laced ball of spit, equivalent to 5 percent to 10 percent of a male fly’s body mass. Gentlemen: Too worn down by the holidays to cough up such an expensive package? Try giving her a dead insect instead. You can always steal it back later.

For the male Zeus bug: a monthlong excursion aboard the luxury liner that is the much larger female’s back, with its scooped-out seat tailored to his dimensions and a pair of dorsal glands to supply the passenger with all the proteinaceous wax he can swallow.

For the bonobo you’ve just met: half your food, at least. Just shovel it over. Sharing is fun!

Oh look, half a cheesecake with half a cross in it. Yum.

We’ve been hearing more and more nonsense about how marvelous the new pope is, in particular from James Carroll in the New Yorker and on Fresh Air. Carroll takes the new pope’s talk about poor people with immense seriousness. He’s been depressed about the church for decades, ever since John 23 did some good things which were reversed the instant he popped his clogs.

Wouldn’t you think that would tell him something? Even if a comparatively not-so-fascist pope gets in somehow and says some nice things…the next one will throw them all out the window. The church isn’t a thing that can reform reliably, because it’s not set up that way.

Anyway…about that marvelous new pope. I was looking at something else so I missed this item last September. [Read more…]

Drop everything! A couple in Arizona have spotted a cross on their cheesecake, so obviously it’s A Message.

A suburban Phoenix family says their Christmas cheesecake sent them the message of a holiday miracle.

The Arizona Republic reports that when the family in Scottsdale, Ariz., pulled their dessert out of the oven, it cracked as it cooled and formed a crucifix.

The family members, who have not given their names publicly, say the crucifix is a message.

They say they won’t be eating the cheesecake. Instead, they plan to sell it and donate the money to a local charity or church.

But that’s the end of the story. They forgot something. What’s the message?

It could be that the family that pulled their dessert out of the oven doesn’t know how to make a cheesecake.

But anyway, whatever it is, you would think that’s part of the story. Strange that they didn’t tell us.

Shall we try to guess?

It’s cold here?

Cut me a slice?

Go to church?

I’m vegan?

Put some berries on top?

Repent?

I died for your sins and now I’m doing guest spots on cheesecakes?

Does this make my butt look big?

Wait, there’s been a mixup, I’m Mohammed?

H/t Leonie Hilliard.

There’s a Free Raif Badawi petition to sign.

Raef Badawi, a Saudi who is one of the establishers of the “Liberal Saudi Network”, which angered Ultra-orthodox clerics of Saudi Arabia could be beheaded soon for a claimed “apostasy” if no action is taken.

The news in Arabic about this issue is numerous, in English it has not got good attention till now, however, this piece of news has been published by AFP:

“A Saudi court on Monday referred a rights activist to a higher court for alleged apostasy, a charge that could lead to the death penalty in the ultra-conservative kingdom, activists said.

A judge at a lower court referred Raef Badawi to a higher court, declaring that he “could not give a verdict in a case of apostasy,” a rights activist told AFP. Apostasy means renunciation of a religious faith.

Badawi, who was arrested a June in the Red Sea city of Jeddah for unknown reasons, is a co-founder of the Saudi Liberal Network with female rights activist Suad al-Shammari and others.”  [Read more…]

Oh damn, I guess I am wading back in after all. So much damn foolery is popping up on my Twitter feed…

Like this other item from Beard Nihilist:

Beard Nihilist @borednihilist

Silly me thinking a white atheist feminist (@opheliabenson) wouldn’t criticize the choices of a Muslim feminist. #solidarityisforwhitewomen

S Mukherjee @essemjee

@borednihilist@OpheliaBenson That Muslim feminist is also white so I don’t get why u are using this hash tag. #solidarityisforwhitewomen

Why indeed. It’s a game of identity bingo, I suppose, in which “choosing” to wear hijab makes you an honorary non-white at least for certain purposes – such as telling of “Cis White Feminism” and getting support from people under the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen.

The discussion is getting more absurd as it continues, and I’m short on time today, so I’m not planning to wade into it again, but one tweet addressed to me does seem worth disputing, because it encapsulates a trope that’s being recycled a lot.

Beard Nihilist @borednihilist

One can dislike Islam as a religion, as both I and @OpheliaBenson do, but criticizing an individual woman’s choices seems anti-feminist.

Really?

So if a couple of friends discuss a mutual friend who has made the “choice” to (say) marry a man who has repeatedly beaten her up, and the friends criticize her “choice”…that’s anti-feminist? [Read more…]

More on Modi from the New York Times.

The fiery head of India’s leading opposition party, who remains under pressure for his handling of an ethnic riot 11 years ago, won a victory on Thursday in one of the many disputes dogging him as he seeks to become India’s next prime minister, but faced a setback in another.

An Indian court rejected a petition seeking the prosecution of the opposition leader, Narendra Modi, the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party, over his role in riots in his home state, Gujarat, in 2002 that killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims. [Read more…]

A Saudi blogger is under threat of being executed for “apostasy” – meaning, daring to leave Islam.

A SAUDI judge has recommended that a liberal activist and blogger be tried in a higher court for apostasy, a charge that could carry the death penalty, rights campaigners say.

A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom sentenced Raef Badawi in July to seven years in jail and 600 lashes for setting up a “liberal” network and for allegedly insulting Islam. [Read more…]

Not good news.

The Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT), chaired by former CBI director RK Raghavan who investigated the 2002 Gujarat riots has concluded in its 541-page closure report that the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi took ample measures to control riots rather than stoking the fire as it is made to be believed. The SIT also questioned the motive behind filing a complaint against the Chief Minister by Zakia Jafri four years after the communal violence.

Modi is apparently on the way to being India’s next prime minister…which is appalling.

Get this part –

The SIT has said that even if Narendra Modi had told the police during the riots to allow the Hindus to vent their anger over the massacre of 56 kar sevaks in the Godhra train burning incident, the mere statement of those in the confines of a room does not constitute an offence. On this, the SIT seems to have based its report on public statements made by Modi during the riots.

Jeezis.

Someone at the invaluable Facebook group British Muslims for Secular Democracy posted an article in the Huffington Post last May by Ali Rizvi, An Atheist Muslim’s Perspective on the ‘Root Causes’ of Islamist Jihadism and the Politics of Islamophobia.

It begins by quoting.

The ambassador answered us that [their right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

The above passage is not a reference to a declaration by al Qaeda or some Iranian fatwa. They are the words of Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassador to France, reporting to Secretary of State John Jay a conversation he’d had with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, Tripoli’s envoy to London, in 1786 — more than two and a quarter centuries ago. [Read more…]