Now that we have the formula, we have but to implement it

I decided I didn’t believe in gods when I went through Lutheran confirmation classes and realized what a load of codswallop it all was. That’s not easy to repeat with other people; the other side has many tried and true techniques to win people over to their culty silliness. We’ve all heard about love-bombing, and the thing is…it works on some people. But you know us atheists, we just can’t do the love thing, we’re all coldly rational and satanically ruthless in our criticism. But Jonny Scaramanga describes how he was weaned from fundamentalism, and suddenly, our strategy is clear.

Then, on my 19th birthday, someone bought me a vodka and Coke. And this was brilliant, because it just tasted like awful Coke. I could drink awful Coke. I already did when I went to my step-gran’s house and she produced a bottle that had been sitting open, in direct sunlight, for a month.

The discovery of vodka and Coke, which meant that I could go to the pub and join in, changed everything. I immediately started going to a Wednesday night rock club, where a double vodka and Coke was about £2. Because I’d never drunk in my life, I could get absolutely hammered for less than a tenner. And I did. A lot.

The first time I went clubbing, a girl took it upon herself to sit in my lap, before leading me to the dancefloor and kissing me passionately. This was the future.

OK, got it. Cheap alcohol, check. Rock music, check. Dancing, check. Kissing, check.

This is the solution. We can do this. If every one of you atheists carries out this procedure on one Christian each this weekend, we can double our numbers by Sunday morning. By my conservative estimate, if we repeat that every week, we’ll have deconverted the entire population of the US by late August. And it’s all stuff we do all the time anyway!

Man, all the time we’ve wasted with arguing when we could have just been partying…

CDD

Oh, those wacky mixed-up Christians and their warped authoritarianism. There’s this…thing… going around called Christian Domestic Discipline (CDD), in which Heads of Households (HoHs; there are lots of acronyms here) are encouraged to spank their wives. That’s right, it’s always husbands doing the spanking — anything else would violate God’s natural order, of course.

Christian Domestic Discipline, or CDD as its adherents call it, is a movement that seeks to carry out God’s will. Which specific plan of God’s? Oh, you know, just that all women obey their husbands fastidiously — a dynamic that CDD thinks is best maintained through doling out out corporal punishments. Its few thousand practitioners, however, claim that it’s not domestic abuse.

The very-serious practitioners have this discipline have conveniently put together a 50 page guide to spanking your wife (pdf) — somehow these obsessive cranks always get carried away trying to justify their abuses. It’s terrible and ridiculous. Read the thing, and all you learn is how much these kooks want to infantilize women.

There is hope for my great-great-great-grandchildren yet

Yes! I knew it! I, for one, welcome our proud molluscan future.

In a breakthrough study that researchers say adds important insight into the evolution of Homo sapiens, scientists at the University of Michigan confirmed Thursday that human beings are slowly evolving into mollusks. “Evidence shows that modern humans emerged on the evolutionary timeline about 200,000 years ago, developed into the highly evolved hominids of today, and are now transforming into soft-bodied invertebrates,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Mitch Keneally, adding humans have already started turning into snails, slugs, and octopi, evidenced by their increasingly amorphous figures. “Over the next 1,000 years, we’re going to see people developing gills, a hard protective shell around their torsos, and a large, muscular foot in their dorsal region that will help with locomotion and mucus secretion. The world is changing rapidly, and those who can’t filter seawater aren’t going to be able to survive.”

Once we have a large muscular foot, the next step is subdividing it into tentacles … I know you all laughed mockingly at my fascination with the fierce many-armed denizens of the deep, but your laughter will cease when my descendants drag you down in their embrace, their beaks gnashing, their hooked suckers rending your flesh.

By the way, that global warming stuff? All part of the plan. All we have to do is raise the sea level about 400 meters, and Morris, Minnesota will once again be under a delightful shallow sea.

Flying over the Bakken

Ecoflight is a non-profit that uses light planes in the service of wildlands conservation. (I got on their mailing list a couple years ago after I took one of their flights over the California desert with pilot Bruce Gordon.)

Today’s offering from EcoFlight’s mailing list included a link to this video of oil drilling in North Dakota’s Bakken Formation. It’s sobering.

Californian that I am, my grasp on North Dakota geography is a little tenuous. I’ve visited the state, but just once, and that was way back in 1996 when Zeke, my ex-wife, and I were all still puppies. I’d imagined the Bakken development as mainly happening in the northwest corner of the state, and we’d visited the southwest corner, near the south unit of Teddy Roosevelt National Park near the bustling micropolis of Medora, where Zeke and I shared a bison burger.

Apparently, despite my assumption, you can see the oil wells flaring at night from the south unit of the Park. One more landscape changed irrevocably in the service of human society.

Living things are more than the sum of their minerals

sockeye

I tell you, that’s a beautiful fish. It’s a sockeye salmon, native to Washington state, British Columbia, and Alaska, a gorgeous anadromous beast that has to spawn in lakes of the Pacific Northwest. Huge numbers of them live in Bristol Bay off the Alaska coast, which is pretty much the center of their population range.

Now mining interests want to gouge out what would be the largest open pit mine in North America in their breeding grounds. They want to punch this monstrosity out in the middle of a wilderness, requiring roads and other infrastructure elements to be built first, and then they’ll sluice the poisonous wastewater and toxic mining tailings out into the Kvichak and Nushagak Rivers, and then out into Bristol Bay. All to recover gold and copper, at the cost of destroying half the sockeye population.

What price are we willing to pay for the privilege of poisoning the salmon?

We are go for fishiness

We are now testing the capabilities of our fully armed and operational homebrew fish facility in the lab. Pumps are humming, water is flowing, we are evaluating all joins for leakage, and it’s looking good. Tomorrow we put in a small bank of tanks and start the water cycle. Next week, fish!

That is all.

I get email

Sometimes it might even be well-meaning, even when I suspect it probably isn’t.

Dear PZ,

You need to get over your obsessive phase with the shallow feminism displayed by Internet “feminists” and begin to think critically about the world again. Yes, vaginas are objectively gross. This is essentially an objective fact, except for “feminists” who believe being a feminist means women poop butterflies and rainbows, such as yourself. (I’m disappointed, as a biologist you should know better.) This isn’t because women are gross. It’s just part of our biology. You know what else is gross? Balls.

Many people, including comedians, have talked about balls being disgusting. Somehow I doubt you’d be all butthurt over this, for instance http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/vw576k/stand-up-whitney-cummings–balls-are-disgusting

Those are also funny commentaries on genitalia by comedians. Yet because they’re about men, not those oh-so-fragile women who dare not hear that their genital-that-is-an-orifice is gross, it’s funny. Hypocrisy, much?

Honestly, PZ, you have gone from a critical thinker into a stereotype of feminism. I know groupthink is hard to break, but if you don’t break it, you’re only doing the world and yourself a disservice. I hope you can, if not for your sake, then for the sake of the freethought movement. And if not for the sake of the freethought movement, then at least for the sake of a rational feminism that is not on a witch hunt for good people who organize rallies to fight sexual violence, but happen to think body parts that ooze are gross, regardless of the sex they belong to. As it stands, you’re doing that rational feminism a disservice. And by unintentionally helping to discredit feminism by affirming the stereotypes about feminists, you’re hurting women in the long term, despite your (hopefully) good intentions.

Best wishes,

Nancy

Is that a fallacy of the excluded middle I see up there? Why, yes it is! Has Nancy ever considered the possibility that there other attitudes somewhere in between “Yuck, that’s gross and disgusting!” and “Oooh, pretty butterflies and rainbows!”? And really, “objectively gross”? How can you say a subjective impression like that is at all objective?

As a biologist, I do know better. All this talk about “grossness” is culturally shaped. Apparently, many people now regard pubic hair as gross — is that an objective truth, too? A great many people have no objections to fluids and squishy oozing things and slippery slimy stuff all over the place — again, it’s cultural conditioning that calls reveling in that abnormal.

I am impressed with the twisty kind of rationalizing that ends up arguing that not finding vulvas hideous and horrible is hurting the cause of feminism. What next? Declaring that the complexions of black people are objectively horrible, and therefore avoiding saying how much more delightsome the skin of Europeans is would be racism?

Also, my balls are very sensitive and delicate, and I find your rude dismissal of their beauty very hurtful.

No honor in the American Civil War

The sesquicentennial of the battle of Gettysburg is coming up soon. Let’s not romanticize it; Tony Horwitz has written a great antidote.

On July 1st, 1863, Alfred Iverson ordered his brigade of North Carolinians across an open field. The soldiers marched in tight formation until Union riflemen suddenly rose from behind a stone wall and opened fire. Five hundred rebels fell dead or wounded "on a line as straight as a dress parade," Iverson reported. "They nobly fought and died without a man running to the rear. No greater gallantry and heroism has been displayed during this war."

That’s the officer’s view. The men in that tight formation had a different perspective.

Soldiers told a different story: of being "sprayed by the brains" of men shot in front of them, or hugging the ground and waving white kerchiefs. One survivor informed the mother of a comrade that her son was "shot between the Eye and ear" while huddled in a muddy swale. Of others in their ruined unit he wrote: "left arm was cut off, I think he will die… his left thigh hit and it was cut off." An artilleryman described one row of 79 North Carolinians executed by a single volley, their dead feet perfectly aligned. "Great God! When will this horrid war stop?" he wrote. The living rolled the dead into shallow trenches–hence the name "Iverson’s Pits," now a grassy expanse more visited by ghost-hunters than battlefield tourists.

The Civil War was not a romantic struggle between the forces of good and evil (both North and South were rather horribly racist), and it was a totally unnecessary war — it was a botched surgery to excise the ugly tumor of hypocrisy established at the founding of this country, and it didn’t do a very good job of that. We still have yahoos celebrating the Confederate flag and so-called Southern values that too often include ignorance and racism. The war may have ended outright slavery, but it didn’t end oppression and discrimination.

And we all lost. Three quarters of a million dead, a legacy of division, widespread racism, and the same battle lines are still drawn in our political parties. What a waste.

My father’s family was involved in that war, too. They were farmers in Iowa, and my several-times great grandfather served with Grant in the campaign that marched down the Mississippi and ended in the capture of New Orleans, where my ancestor was mustered out with an unidentified chronic illness (most likely malaria). And a few years later he lost his farm, and then began several generations of desultory familial peregrinations as migrant farm workers until they washed up on the shores of the Puget Sound, and could go no further. We were all wrecked by that stupid evil war.

Aren’t “Superman” and “physics” incompatible?

This afternoon, at 3pm EDT, James Kakalios, Sean Carroll, and E. Paul Zehr are going to do a live chat about the Science of Superman. I’d say it needs MOAR BIOLOGISTS except just the physics of that movie alone ought to fully occupy the panel.

I’m a little afraid that the movie will get praised (it provides so many “teachable moments”!) rather than reamed out, but we’ll see.