How sad

Paul Jones has died. I didn’t know him, or even know about him, until his obituary was sent to me, but it’s an utterly tragic life story. He was an ordained Baptist minister — there’s a waste of a life right there — and his death was ironic and futile.

He died of a heart attack, just as he was about to pray with a member of his Upper Room Fellowship. His last word was “Jesus”.

Someday I’m going to die, too, and I hope it is while doing something productive, and that I don’t go out with the name of an imaginary being on my lips. And in particular, it would be nice if my obituary would say something about the good things in my life, rather than babbling on about dedication to a superstition.

It’s a shame. Jones might have been a wonderful fellow, but all we strangers know about him is that he was “committed to expanding God’s kingdom” — that he had dedicated his life to a lie.

So, when’s the junta?

Glenn Greenwald depresses me. His latest: Our military has been subverting the media with nicely tailored propaganda. I know, I know, so what else is new…but this is straight from Pentagon memos.

I recommend we develop a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water. They become part of a “hot list” of those that we immediately make calls to or put on an email distro list before we contact or respond to media on hot issues. We can also do more proactive engagement with this list and give them tips on what stories to focus on and give them heads up on issues as they are developing. By providing them with key and valuable information, they become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves . . . .

Read the whole thing. Keep it in mind, too, when you see those talking heads on Fox and CNN: those guys are saps who have been suckered by the military. Why do you get your news from the must gullible parrots on TV?

The Saturday poll

Would you believe a school in Minnesota suspended three eighth graders for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance? Outrageous. The pledge is ridiculous to begin with and replaces conscientious thought with blind obedience, and I think it ought to be rejected everywhere, but to punish students for refusing to kowtow to McCarthyite relics is absurd.

Greg Laden wants us to crash this poll. It’s a bit redundant, fortunately, since the forces of reason are already leading, but let’s tip it farther.

Here’s the silly poll:

Did school officials react properly to the students who did not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance?

  • Yes, but the punishment should have been more severe.
  • Yes, a one-day, in-school suspension is about right.
  • No, they should have been given a warning first.
  • No, they shouldn’t be required to stand.

The platypus genome

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Finals week is upon me, and I should be working on piles of paper work right now, but I need a break … and I have to vent some frustration with the popular press coverage of an important scientific event this week, the publication of a draft of the platypus genome. Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is “weird” or “odd” or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera — “the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal”. No, no, no, a thousand times no; this is the wrong message. The platypus is not part bird, as birds are an independent and (directly) unrelated lineage; you can say it is part reptile, but that is because it is a member of a great reptilian clade that includes prototherians, marsupials, birds, lizards and snakes, dinosaurs, and us eutherian mammals. We can say with equal justification that we are part reptile, too. What’s interesting about the platypus is that it belongs to a lineage that separated from ours approximately 166 million years ago, deep in the Mesozoic, and it has independently lost different elements of our last common ancestor, and by comparing bits, we can get a clearer picture of what the Jurassic mammals were like, and what we contemporary mammals have gained and lost genetically over the course of evolution.

We can see that the journalistic convention of emphasizing the platypus as an odd duck of a composite creature is missing the whole point if we just look at the title of the paper: “Genome analysis of the platypus reveals unique signatures of evolution.” This is work that is describing the evidence for evolution in a comparative analysis of the genomes of multiple organisms, with emphasis on the newly revealed data from the platypus.

[Read more…]

A few things that amused me

Here’s a bizarre miscellany.

  • Well, it’s just Wisconsin.

    Two people have been arrested after a Juneau County Sheriff’s deputy found one of them and her two children living in a home with the body of a 90-year-old woman decomposing on the bathroom toilet.

    Tammy D. Lewis, 35, and Alan A. Bushey, 57, both of Necedah are each charged with two felony counts of causing mental harm to a child, according to a criminal complaint filed Friday. Lewis also faces one count of obstructing police.

    The body was decaying for two months in their bathroom. How could they do that? It takes religion to be that crazy!

    Lewis told the deputy that “God told her Alvina would come back to life if she prayed hard enough.” Bushey told the deputy that “Lewis was obedient and served the Lord just as she should.”

    The 12-year-old boy later told investigators that after Middlesworth died, Bushey told him her appearance “was the result of demons attempting to make it appear that Alvina would not come back to life. The boy also reportedly said that Bushey told him that if Middlesworth’s death was discovered, he and his sister would have to go to public school and get jobs because the woman, whom the boy referred to as his “grandmother,” was paying the bills.

  • The ICR has put out an enemies list. There are three people on it: Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, and … me! They noticed <sniff> — I’m so touched.

  • Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya, the notorious Turkish creationist, has been convicted of “creating an illegal organization for personal gain”, and has been sentenced to 3 years in a Turkish prison. Hooray! Justice at last!

When will they learn? Another internet poll

The town of Frankenmuth, Michigan likes to flaunt their crosses — they’ve put them up on signs, and they’ve got one on the city logo. I suspect the town contains a Christian majority, so their local news probably felt safe putting up an online poll asking,

Should Frankenmuth remove its cross from the city shield?

They don’t expect a horde of ravening godless atheists to descend on them and vote “YES!” — they never do. Mount up, internet warriors, and assault their poll with fire and sword and level it until they reel back crying for mercy.

Frankenmuth won’t know what hit them.*

*Literally; most probably won’t even notice. It’s just a pointless internet poll.

Shiny. Pretty. Slimy.

Wired has a pretty gallery of images from the recent Colossal Squid necropsy. If you’ve ever wondered what a pile of squid guts would look like on a table, here you go.

i-8e7802c0c7cc4151566d81f9a2db01e8-squid_guts.jpg

It’s too bad the images aren’t quite large enough to use as wallpaper on my laptop.

Oh, and those colors—that’s exactly what slug guts look like, too. We natives of the Pacific Northwest have many opportunities to get familiar with those.