Fleeing Minnesota for California, briefly

It’s been miserably slushy and cold out here in Minnesota, hardly any spring at all — I have serious concerns that my incoming shipment of fertilized chicken eggs for my development course may not survive the journey. We may still be below freezing up to the last week of the semester! So it’s good news that I’m escaping at the last day of classes to go to Southern California for the Orange County Freethought Alliance Annual Conference on 3-4 May.

They aren’t predicting any blizzards down there, are they? I’ve gone through two in the last two weeks, and I’m ready to have them stop.

Also, I’m scheduled to appear on the Michael Slate Show on KPFK radio at 10am that Friday morning. We’re threatening to pollute the airwaves with talk of unabashed godlessness.

Don’t go outside!

I made the mistake of leaving my snug warm house. It’s windy out there! The temperatures are right there on that edge where one minute it’s snowing, the next it’s sleeting, the next it’s raining, and then back ’round again! It’s cold, damp, and piercing; I prefer a calm dry -20°F to this soggy frigidity.

I’m staying indoors the rest of the day. Slippers on. Snuggly blanket close at hand. Not looking out the window ever.

Robin Ince vs. Brendan O’Neill

At #QEDcon (which sounds like a marvelous conference from the enthusiastic tweets resounding everywhere) there was a panel discussion yesterday that I’m looking forward to seeing appear on youtube.

Brendan O’Neill, professional conservative ass, put his opening remarks, “Is science becoming a new religion?” online. It’s a bizarre tirade — it cusses out this new-fangled trend of demanding evidence and expertise for policy decisions, probably because such demands cut him off at the knees.

Robin Ince, professional comedian and science advocate, has put his reaction online, titled “The fascism of knowing stuff”. He’s a bit incredulous that anyone in a culture that uses technology more sophisticated than a buggy whip could be against knowledge.

As someone who has often been called a fascist, you can guess which side of this argument I favor.

I guess I’m a disbelieber now

Justin Bieber is simply not on my radar — I have zero interest in his music, and I think it’s just fine that the teens of each generation have their own celebrity heartthrobs (in my generation, it was Shaun Cassidy; who else remembers him anymore?) But I don’t remember Cassidy or Leif Garrett or any of the other fleeting pop sensations* getting quite so full of themselves as this. Bieber visited the Anne Frank Museum, and this is what he left in the guest book (this was posted by the museum itself, so it’s straight from the source, in case you find it unbelievable…errm, unbeliebable).

Yesterday night Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank House, together with his friends and guards. Fans were waiting outside to see a glimpse of him. He stayed more than an hour in the museum. In our guestbook he wrote: "Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber."

Tonight Bieber will give a concert in Arnhem in the Netherlands.

Like I said, I don’t have any gripes about popular teenage singers. But when one rises to such extraordinary levels of asshattery, it’s hard to avoid commenting.

*OK, maybe Michael Jackson got to be that full of himself, to tragic results. And Kirk Cameron was briefly regarded as a teenage object of desire, and look at him now…but that’s more chronic egotism, rather than the acute narcissism Bieber is exhibiting.

Your comparisons make me cry

When we’ve got bad news, we get comparisons that show how deluded people are on other subjects. The NRA has been doing a great job promoting less gun control, and one of their tactics has been the myth of woman empowerment by gun…when on average, women are far more anti-gun than men. But do I really need to be reminded that 29% of Americans believe in little green men?

The data on guns isn’t so good for the ladies. A 2003 study by The American Journal of Public Health found there was “no clear evidence” that owning a gun reduced women’s chances of being killed. An analysis this year by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that “in states that require a background check for every handgun sale, 38 percent fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners.” Six times more women were murdered by intimate partners than by strangers in 2010. A study published in the Journal of Urban Health in 2002 found that women were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun in states with high gun ownership than in states with low gun ownership. Of the 10 states with the highest rates of female homicide, five are in the South. Southern white men are the most likely to own guns, at 61 percent. Southern white women are the women most likely to own guns, at 25 percent. That’s 5 percent more than the percent of American women who believe aliens exist. 

Aliens: More real than the myth that more guns means women are safer.

Or how about this: we get the good news that public support for gay marriage is rising, but get reminded that belief in creationism has been steady, and right now, only 44% disapprove of gay marriage, while 46% think the earth is 6000 years old.

What is going on? The Supreme Court hearings on the challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s ban on same-sex marriage suggest barriers to legalisation will fall eventually. Growing public support for same-sex marriage is another factor: the latest poll by the Pew Research Center shows 49 per cent of Americans approve of same-sex marriage, with 44 per cent disapproving.

This number is significant, not just because it shows that the swing in support for same-sex marriage has been swift, but because – as Jon Stewart pointed out on The Daily Show this week – more Americans have an “evolved” view on same-sex marriage than actually believe in evolution. Forty-six per cent of them think the human race was created in a single day within the past 10,000 years, according to a 2012 Gallup poll. It is unclear how many of them will eventually evolve this view.

I get the message. People aren’t rational.

But I also get the promising message from the fact that we see a rise in support for gay marriage that there are tactics that work, and they involve actually touching personal and emotional and human values. The gay marriage campaign has been working because they’ve combined sound, logical arguments — how can you deny rights to one couple and give them to another? — with personal stories of people in love, and people excluded by cold regulations and bigotry.

We ought to try that more.

Can we at least fire this one media lackey?

When the revolution comes, media lackeys will not be lined up against the wall. I have a better idea, inspired by Robert Johnson of Business Insider, who actually wrote an article titled THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GITMO STRIKE: Detainees Are Treated Absurdly Well. He had the gall to write this:

While indefinite detainment without trial may be morally offensive…

Whoa, whoa, WHOA. Robert, I’m going to have to stop you right there. Indefinite detainment without trial IS morally offensive, so why are you writing a defense of it? Don’t you think that clause just brings your whole argument to a screeching halt? The “While…” tells me already that you are about to completely ignore the morality of the issue.

But go ahead, continue.

…the overriding philosophy on base these days is to treat the detainees really well. Compliant detainees enjoy a selection of six balanced meals, 25 cable TV channels, classes, and an array of electronic gadgetry and entertainment. I’m talking about a Nintendo DS for every compliant detainee, plus Playstation 3 access with a library full of video games.

OK, you seem to think that is sufficient to offset the immorality of indefinite detainment. Which is where my idea comes from: after the revolution, you, Robert, will be confined in a small room with a television, some holy books, a healthy but bland diet, and some video games. You’ll be happy, I presume? It’ll be just like a long, very long, vacation at a secluded island resort!

Except, you know, you actually wrote that the detainees are treated absurdly well, and also wrote this about the guards’ custom of taking apart copies of the Koran.

Zak demonstrated why Koran inspections are important, taking a hardcover Koran, flipping it upside down, and showing the wide opening under the spine.

Last time they stopped Koran searches, he explains, several detainees stashed medication in these tunnels of paper and then took the medication all at once in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Suicide is another effective way of getting media attention, and there remains a rumor among detainees that three simultaneous suicides would force the Pentagon to close Guantanamo — despite three suicides already happening in 2006.

It’s a bit odd, don’t you think, that while on this long vacation with good food and lots of video games, the residents are in such despair that they’re trying to kill themselves.

I’ll warn my wife. Next time I get a few days off and am lounging about eating and playing video games, it’s really a sign that I’m miserable and should be on suicide watch.

The Christian Theocracy isn’t planning to murder me after all!

I am so relieved, and a bit ashamed that I thought so poorly of my Christian brethren. They aren’t going to kill me, they have other plans. They’ll make me a slave instead!

In a recently posted You Tube [which has now been set to private –pzm] sermon, the pastor of Chalcedon Presbyterian Church, Dr. Joe Morecraft says in a Biblical society, the godly must own “the fool who despises God’s wisdom” because it’s the only way to keep those with a “slave mentality” from ruining other people’s families.

Based on Proverbs 11:29, Morecraft makes a case for Biblically justified enslavement of a man who does not “trust in Christ” since slavery is the only way to “keep a fool under wraps.”

The dominionist pastor interprets the Proverb to predict that in a Christian theocracy, an unbeliever will “lose his family, his property, and his freedom,” and “his energies, talents and life will not be used as he himself pleases, but in the service of wise people who work hard to benefit the community.”

“Put him in somebody’s service where they can watch over him and make him do right even though he doesn’t want to do it.”

According to Pastor Morecraft, the consequences of being a “foolish person who is unwilling to live by the Word of God” is to “become a slave of somebody who is godly and who is wise.”

Well, now I can relax. What a load off my shoulders.

And it’s only fair. After all, once I’m appointed Tyrant-President of the United States of America (there’s no way I could even be elected to the lowliest office), I have my own horribly sinister plans for the religious people of this country. First thing, I’d remove the special tax privileges their churches and religious charities have, and then…and then…uh, I guess that’s about it. But that’s pretty damned terrible!

More lies from the Discovery Institute

Oh, christ. Another book is coming from those frauds at the DI, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. It’s Stephen Meyer’s unqualified, incompetent take on the Cambrian explosion.

Casey Luskin has already given us three reasons we’re supposed to buy it. 1) It’s going to contain the best arguments for intelligent design creationism EVAR; 2) it’s going to be packed full of reviews of the work of the “ID research community”; and 3) we’re living in a “post-Darwinian world”, where all the evolutionary biologists are already deserting the sinking ship of neo-Darwinism. Those aren’t reasons to buy the book; those are reasons the book is going to be total crap.

And why should you read it anyway? You want to know about the Cambrian, read books by real scientists. They’re out there already. One excellent resource is James Valentine’s On the Origin of Phyla; it is not light reading, but if you want to know about the paleontology and systematics of the invertebrate phyla of the Ediacaran and Cambrian, it really is the book to read.

And then to my surprise, while I was digging up the link to that book, I discovered that Douglas Erwin and James Valentine have a new book out as of January: The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity, which the reviews say is less technical than the Phyla text, but highly rated as an excellent overview. I can’t say I’ve read it yet, but I instantly ordered it.

I think it might be an interesting summer project to compare Erwin & Valentine side-by-side with Meyer. Well, “interesting” in a Bambi Meets Godzilla sort of amusing sense.

But if you want to know what caused the Cambrian explosion, I can give you the short answer. Not intelligent design; that doesn’t even make sense. What it was was environmental changes, in particular the bioturbation revolution caused by the evolution of worms that released buried nutrients, and the steadily increasing oxygen content of the atmosphere that allowed those nutrients to fuel growth; ecological competition, or a kind of arms race, that gave a distinct selective advantage to novelties that allowed species to occupy new niches; and the evolution of developmental mechanisms that enabled multicellular organisms to generate new morphotypes readily. Read the real books if you want to know more, and ignore the uninformed babble the charlatans of the DI will try to sell you.

By the way, Joe Felsenstein is asking for help: he’d like suggestions for what Stephen Meyer ought to have in his book.