All that naked Greek statuary, with all their naughty bits hanging out…someone had to document ancient Greek testicles, and that person was Ingrid Berthon Moine.
Hey! Hey you! My eyes are way up here! I’ll have you know I’m much more than just a pretty ball sack…although the boys are spectacular, if I do say so myself.
Many people have asked what happened to Chris Rodda’s blog. I wondered that, too — it disappeared very abruptly, without warning and without notification to all the other bloggers here. There was nothing nefarious about it, though: she voluntarily asked Ed Brayton to pull it, Ed was traveling so he couldn’t inform all of us, and just had time to ask our tech master to do the deed. Rodda explains on Facebook.
So, I have now officially left FTB. By my request, my blog there has been completely scrubbed. This was actually a long time coming, but today was the last straw. Although there are some friends and other bloggers there who I really like, that site was just not where I belonged. I thought that my being a secularism and religious freedom activist would be enough, but the honest truth is that some atheists are as bad as the fundamentalist Christians that we fight, and after the comments I was seeing on my post there today — the same post that has gotten an overwhelmingly positive response on both HuffPo and Daily Kos, and also from MRFF supporters and even a few unlikely sources — I knew that it was time for me to leave FTB. So, that’s that, my blog there is now gone.
Apparently, what crystalized her decision was that several of us criticized a recent post, the one that she cites on Huffington Post, in which she was very irate that Mikey Weinstein, who is Jewish, was called an atheist on Fox News. She was right to be annoyed, and made a good case for the nuisance of constant misrepresentation of Weinstein and the MRFF by right wingers, but I think she made the argument that calling someone an atheist was defamation. I said so; I mentioned that I often get the flip side of that, being ‘accused’ of being a Jew when I’m not, and that we’d be rightfully appalled if I acted insulted and thought I was being defamed by being called Jewish.
Despite the fact that I’ve long appreciated her work and think she was an asset to the network, this criticism was apparently the final straw for her, and she left. Maybe that’s for the best, given that she seems to think “atheist” is a legally actionable slander, and also that she thinks the praise of the HuffPo readership is actually worth something.
I’m heading in to the Twin Cities tonight, to join a panel on approaches to science education for the public. I haven’t seen any advertising for it, I was told that there were some other panelists, but that their involvement was tentative. I was asked by the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists to do this, and trusting fool that I am, I agreed, so off I go.
It’s in Folwell Hall 112, at 7pm. I need you all to go and check it out: if the room is eerily empty, it was a trap, and I’ve been abducted. Contact the FBI, the NSA, NASA, and Interpol! Tell them my last contact was with Chelsea Du Fresne! Mount a rescue! Run around in circles and shout!
Otherwise, well, you’ll get to attend an interesting discussion about an important topic. Not quite as exciting as a cunningly planned kidnapping, but you know, sometimes life just cruises along pleasantly.
When we bought our house, it came with a disconnected, nonfunctional hot tub. It’s still here, sitting unused in our back yard, because having a mere Ph.D. in biology means that I don’t know how to fix it, and also, I don’t get paid enough to afford to have it fixed by a competent hot tub expert. And thus am I made to realize that I am a failure. I shouldn’t have wasted effort on that lowly science degree; instead, I should have learned how to install hot tubs.
Because hot tub experts are wizards, masters of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time.
I have been reading the works of James Arjuna, International Spa Design Engineer, who is a real scientist. He said so.
I am a real scientist for over 47 years. I make my living producing functional equipment that always works as designed because I don’t use any pseudo science. I hate pseudo science religious crap in academia.
He says so frequently.
Please check out my science blog. It is based on over 47 years of using the scientific method to solve problems and to seek to find what is really true.
Here is where I do most of my recent research. I have read over 41,000 papers on biology, DNA, Evolution, genetics.
I don’t know which science blog to check out, though, since he didn’t provide a link. He has several!
41,000 papers is a lot. In 47 years, that’s 2 or 3 papers a day, which is about what I read. It’s hard work reading a science paper with comprehension, so his dedication to biology may be why his hot tub business has some bitter complaints, and why his brother thinks he’s a sleazy con artist. Mastery of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time makes demands on one’s life; sacrifices must be made. This is another mark of my failure; I’m not guilty of bad business practices, and I haven’t alienated either of my brothers yet. I don’t think; maybe I’ll have to ask when I see them next month.
So I looked up Arjuna’s latest science article to learn wisdom and discover the deep secrets of the Hot Tub Masters. In this, he asserts that there is not and never has been a beneficial mutation. His chosen example? The lactose tolerance mutation, because while it may be beneficial, it couldn’t possibly have happened.
The most ridiculous of this is the lactose tolerance mutation. First of all making lactase is made in a gene that is 49,335 base pairs for just one of the THREE lactase genes. This is the most common gene found in lactose intolerance.
First rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Find a big number. Numbers are sciencey, and big ones are hard, and 49,335 sounds scary. How could it be? 49,355 whatevers must be impossible!
According to the article claiming that this was some great event creating this new gene. It turns out that it is only 2 base pares were changed to cause this gene to function. Where did the other totally designed 49332 BP come from that were aligned perfectly and just needed two base pares to change?
Second rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Find a small number. We must trivialize any accomplishment. Only 2 out of that intimidating 49,355? That can’t possibly matter. The scientists will splutter, “but single nucleotide changes can distort the whole shape of a molecule, or disrupt a biochemically active site; and in this case, the modification is to a cis regulatory element which modifies expression, not the sequence of the enzyme”, but you can ignore them, because of the obvious fact that 2 is a lot less than 49,355.
Third rule of the Hot Tub Masters: You are not bounded by any rules. Even though you’re making a strangely irrelevant argument from arithmetic, you can say that 49355 – 2 = 49332, and no one will care. Also, spelling is an oppressive tool of those pinheads in academia.
Fourth rule of the Hot Tub Masters: You can read 41,000 papers on biology, DNA, Evolution, genetics
and still not understand basic biology, and that’s OK. The thousands of bases in a gene must be aligned perfectly
in your head, whatever that means, and never mind that that is not a rule in reality.
Hot Tub Masters are free spirits. Truth is whatever they say it is.
It was a pre-existing gene from ancient ancestors prior to this finding and they found a group where it was turned off and then a group where they drank milk where it was functioning. The two base pairs were not mutated from disease in the functioning gene and in the malfunctioning gene it was and is a disease.
Fifth rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Consistency be damned. You can simultaneously announce that there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation, and that groups without the mutation are diseased
(surprise, lactose intolerant individuals! You are afflicted with a disease!) and that groups that have the mutation are not diseased. And that it wasn’t a mutation anyway.
In the 2.5 million DNA studies there are no cases of any living or recently extinct (6000 yrs on human studies) showing even one verifiable beneficial mutation.
Not one of the PhD’s have been able to produce one. Therefore, there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation. It is fantasy.
But…but James! You’ve only read 41,000 of the 2.5 million studies!
And I am so confused. The Hot Tub Master plainly said that the 2 nucleotide variation was the difference between diseased and not diseased. Even in his own head it’s clearly beneficial to carry that trait.
We know that Evolutionists believe that “duplication” mutations are the “power behind evolution”. But even a base pair duplication causes disease or deformity because it destroys the original proteins construction with extra proteins that cannot be integrated.
Well, a single base pair duplication would be a frame shift mutation, so it certainly would mess up the structure of the protein. But we’re talking about segmental duplications, where a complete copy of the original gene is left intact and a duplicate is made elsewhere.
I don’t even understand what he’s talking about when he says a single base duplication creates extra proteins that cannot be integrated
. That makes no sense. It’s almost as if he has no understanding of molecular biology and genetics at all.
But that cannot be! He’s an International Man of Mystery Spa Design Engineer!
They cannot be integrated because the HOX genes have to place them into the correct use and the HOX genes are master programmed for a specific master plan of the organism.
Then they cannot be recognized by the immune system and so the immune system takes the only messed up proteins and attacks them. Every mutation destroys the recognition of both the HOX to use them and the immune system to destroy them as foreign attack cells, that our immune system does not recognize.
I…what? I know a little bit about HOX genes; they don’t control every little thing, every gene in every cell. They set up domains with specific body plan identities in early development. Most genes don’t interact with HOX genes at all, so it’s a little peculiar to claim they limit everything — I’m beginning to think the Hot Tub Master memorized a few buzz words and phrases and is plastering them all over his cartoonish and wrong vision of how gene regulation works.
As for his immune system argument — does he know nothing about how adaptive immunity works? How self/non-self recognition is a product of selection?
James Arjuna is bringing discredit to the noble traditions of the Hot Tub Masters. I suspect that he is not a True Hot Tub Master™, and I’m going to have to look farther for a master of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time. I also think my broken hot tub is going to continue to languish in my back yard, because if his knowledge of hot tubs is as sound as his knowledge of biology, I wouldn’t want him to come near it.
I know I sure can’t do anything about it. I know nothing about hot tubs. Nothing at all.
Check it out: true stories of evolutionary theory.
The Onion lampoons an attitude we’ve encountered here a few times before.
With her remarkable ability to determine exactly how others should be allocating their limited resources for food, local woman Carol Gaither is considered to be one of the foremost authorities on what poor people should and should not have in their grocery carts, sources said Thursday.
As verified by multiple eyewitness reports from supermarkets across the Northampton area, the real estate agent and mother of three is capable of scanning the contents of any low-income person’s basket and rapidly identifying those items which people like that don’t need to be buying, based on the products’ nutrition and cost. Additionally, Gaither, 48, is widely regarded as a leading expert in determining which groceries they would purchase instead if they had any common sense or restraint.
Creepy. How is it funny if there really are a lot of people out there like that?
Mississippi has a law that allows stores to discriminate against gay customers, so some of the more enlightened businesses that would rather sell their stuff to anyone willing to pay for it are putting up stickers in their windows to let everyone know that they have no objection to gay people.
Isn’t that nice? They’ll serve gay people, straight people, Christians, maybe even atheists.
Except…the American Patriarchy Association has announced that those stickers are bullying.
AFA spokesman Buddy Smith said: “If you do that, you are agreeing with these businesses that Christians no longer have the freedom to live out the dictates of their Christian faith and conscience.
“It’s not really a buying campaign, but it’s a bully campaign, and it’s being carried out by radical homosexual activists who intend to trample the freedom of Christians to live according to the dictates of scripture.
“They don’t want to hear that homosexuality is sinful behaviour – and they wish to silence Christians and the church who dare to believe this truth.
I don’t even…so personally following your own moral dictates that say you should not oppress others for their sexual preferences tramples the freedom of Christians
? OK. Then I shall trample Christian morality wherever I go.
Those creationists…their arguments get ever more sophisticamated, and are being increasingly difficult to refute. Look at Senator Mike Fair, putting all them scientists in their place:
@BeeeeeJuh eyeball = creation
— Senator Mike Fair (@SenatorMikeFair) April 2, 2014
eyeball = creation
If only Darwin had considered the evolution of the eye, or if modern scientists had studied the evolution of the molecules of vision, maybe we’d be able to respond.
And he’s a senator. Isn’t “senator” synonymous with “smart”?
If you ever want to see the typical course of a creationist’s visit to Pharyngula, we’ve got a good example in medic0506, who showed up to argue and then didn’t. I mostly ignored him, but his announcement that he was disappointed caught my eye.
I was told on DDO that there were actual scientists here who would engage in informal argumentation, so since I’ve had my fun with the whineylibs, I’ll scroll through an see if there is any valid posts by someone who wishes to have a discussion rather than just try to scratch my eyeballs out.
This is standard noise from creationists: get thrown lots of evidence, then claim that there was no evidence and they’re all so very tired of it. So I thought I would take a look at his posting history here to see what kind of substantial, thought-provoking, evidence-based arguments he had made.
Surprise. There weren’t any.
He’s very proud to have coined the term “National Coven for the Solicitation of Evolutionism” for the NCSE. He thinks it fits because Eugenie Scott reminds him of the wicked witch
. Why? Because she lied and said Meyer’s awful paper, The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories, didn’t mention ID (what? It was an ID paper; the whole issue with that is that it was smuggled in by a creationist editor friendly to the idea, making a farce of peer review). As evidence, he provided this video:
I really would not want to cite that as favorable to intelligent design creationism. Meyer was disgraceful, Eugenie was patient and calm, and she didn’t say what medic0506 claimed she said.
Then he declares that he is a young earth creationist. In reply to a comment that he’s flat-out denying the overwhelming scientific consensus, he waves away that little problem of contradicting physics, chemistry, and geology by saying it only takes 1 to be right
.
Next we learn That “old book” [the Bible], on the other hand, paints an accurate picture of what nature should, and does look like, so I see no need to disregard it in favor of what others believe.
He then ignores all the comments that point to verses in the Bible that paint a very inaccurate picture of the world. Sometimes the absence of a reply is as damning as the content of a reply.
When confronted with standard evidence for an ancient universe, like the existence of galaxies farther away than 6000 light years, he simply denies it: your belief in deep time is heavy on theory but light on actual evidence
.
The rest is just repetitive noise, and then he starts talking about retreat because there is a dearth of scientists here. He can’t make a single positive argument for his goofy beliefs, and his entire visit was simply an exercise in evasion.
Unimpressed. Bored. That’s why I didn’t bother to engage with yet another asinine fool stopping by — he had nothing to discuss, and he knew that if he brought up any actual arguments for a young earth or creation by divine poofery, he’d have his head handed to him.
Yay! We have a major eruption of kookery from medic0506!
I’m willing to be proven wrong on this, but I don’t believe that starlight is something that actually physically travels to earth, in order for us to see it. I think that light is emitted from an energy source, and if the amount of energy released as light is enough, the object will be bright enough for our eyes to see it from earth. I don’t buy when someone argues that starlight has been traveling for billions of years to get here. Feel free to prove me wrong by proving the current understanding of light travel, but no one else so far has been able to address this without just throwing more theoretical BS at it.
So light doesn’t actually travel at some limited speed, but if it’s really, really bright, it is instantly transported to our eyes. All that empirical evidence, all those measurements of the speed of light…that’s all just theoretical BS. Why should we throw out all of physics? Because a creationist thinks brightness can substitute for velocity.
Unbelievable, I know — especially when there are so many right wing guardians of the Constitution and every word of the Founding Fathers in office. But they’re the ones shredding the Constitution!
I guess today has been declared a National Day of Prayer by congress, in complete violation of the first amendment. A Montana judge explains exactly why this is a bad idea.
So, besides violating the principle of separation of church and state, what’s wrong with a national (or state) day of prayer? First, Americans don’t need a congressional proclamation to tell them to pray; they already have a personal, constitutional right to pray – or not to pray – as they (not the government) see fit.
Second, government is not permitted to be in the business of telling people whether to pray, when to pray or who to pray to.
Third, the National Day of Prayer has become a vehicle for spreading religious misinformation and fundamentalist Christian doctrine under the aegis of the government – again precisely what the framers were seeking to prohibit.
Feel free to pray or not pray today – not in response to a congressional proclamation but because you have a constitutional right to do either. But, if you choose to pray, you may want to ask that our elected officials begin to honor the letter and spirit of the First Amendment and respect the separation of church and state.
After all, each previously swore an oath to do just that.
I choose to honor this day by blatantly and offensively not-praying all day long. And anyone who dares to ask me to pray is going to get two middle fingers, rampant, and a suggestion that they go tell their god to go fuck himself, from me, because I don’t talk to imaginary entities.
