It beats Vacation Bible School

A church, Panama City Beach’s Life Center is no longer tax exempt, because authorities decided that they didn’t like its sacraments…which involved nude body-painting events (but the human body is one of god’s greatest creations, how can you object to celebrating it?) and selling sexually explicit t-shirts (again, sex is holy, isn’t it?). They were specifically appealing to college youth who were in town for spring break.

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Junk DNA must be…fractal ballast!

I’ve now read two novel attempts to explain the existence of junk DNA. To a lot of people, the very idea of junk DNA is offensive: whatever process built us, whether divine fiat or the razor-sharp honing of natural selection, must be powerful, omnipotent or nearly so, and incapable of tolerating any noise or sloppiness, especially not to the degree seen in the eukaryotic genome. There is no room for error in design.

There’s also a strong whiff of human exceptionalism. Look at us, we’re pretty much perfect! Or at least, movie stars and super-models are the pinnacle of creation/evolution. How can you even look at Scarlett Johansson or George Clooney and suggest that they are built of monkey bits and lizard leftovers, or that their manufacture was in any way slapdash?

So there’s an amazing fringe literature out there reaching desperately to find some excuse to justify every scrap of DNA, and especially every bit of human DNA, as purposeful. It sometimes gets weird.

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Ben Ketchum doesn’t seem to be a very nice guy

Ashley Manta was discussing her own rape trauma with a friend, when she named her rapist: a fellow named Ben Ketchum. There followed one of those series of confirmations that are rather terrifying: her friend had also been raped by Ketchum. Then she put up a blog post naming her rapist, and more women who knew him came out to say what he’d done.

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