Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Bill Donohue doesn’t think so.
Parents in Maine’s Scarborough School District say that efforts to ban Christmas have become so extreme that they now refer to Christmas as the new ‘C-word.’ In nearby New Hampshire, things aren’t any better. For example, the principal of Epping Elementary School boasts that his school raises money for the needy, ‘but we don’t call it a Christmas gift drive,’ and that’s because ‘it’s a time for giving and that’s pretty much universal.’ But if that’s the case, why choose December as the gift-giving month? Similarly, why is December ‘a time for giving’? His counterpart at Newfields Elementary is so wound up about Christmas that he actually said, ‘we’ve tried to distance ourselves from religion and world events.’ No doubt he’s been a smashing success.
Yadda yadda yadda. Who cares anymore? We’ve got a mid-winter break in schools around the country — it’s a good time to do something for others, whether you call it Christmas or Kwanzaa or Boodlyboop. Doesn’t matter. We’ll do stuff that we enjoy with friends and family, and we’ll do it without bowing down to your silly Jesus character, which is what really rankles right-wing Catholics.
But really, ol’ Bill tends to get upset about the most ludicrous things. The Scarborough school district calendar for December 2015 has the forbidden “C-Word” on it three times; but it looks like they showed an evil anti-Christian movie to the kids on the 15th.
The Student Advocacy office is sponsoring an ELF movie event on Tuesday, December 15th 2:30-4:30 in the SMS cafeteria. We are asking that students donate either a new, unwrapped toy or $5 for Toys for Tots. We will also have a bake sale with home baked goods provided by students and staff. All proceeds from this sale will go directly to Toys for Tots.
The movie was Elf. Not only was Jesus not in it, but it was all about an illegal alien trying to make Christmas all about having fun, rather than going to Mass.
Oops, I said the C-Word. Sorry, everyone.
Hey, doesn’t Elf use the C-Word a whole bunch of times? Those poor kids must have walked out of that cafeteria with blistered ears and a soul packed with damnation.
If you’re going to argue that Trump is not running a grossly racist campaign, how do you explain this? A Muslim woman was booed, harassed, and thrown out simply for standing up quietly at a Trump rally. She was not their kind of human being, apparently.
These guys ignored the events happening beneath their feet.
How strange. I was accused of neglecting an event important to feminists, the sexual assaults in Köln on New Year’s Eve. It was a peculiar concern to make, because I’m not CNN or Fox News (thank dog), I’m one guy, and I can’t write about everything. And in particular, one good outcome of these disgraceful and horrid attacks is that they have been received with universal condemnation, from the German chancellor on down — for a change, no one is saying “boys will be boys” or suggesting that the attacks weren’t actually driven by contempt for women, or arguing that all the assaillants were mentally ill loners. And I’ve actually seen quite a few feminist responses to the crimes, like this one.
Don’t you just love those photo series of the young’uns at different ages?
Developmental staging of Octopus bimaculoides. a Whole egg photomicrograph illustrates the egg stalk and the animal pole (asterisk) where the embryonic body forms. Extent of epiboly in this stage (st) 8 embryo is marked with arrowheads. b End on view of a stage 8 embryo with the egg capsule and yolk removed. In dark field illumination, the organ primordia are visible as ectodermal and mesodermal thickenings. The mantle anlage (m) is central, the prospective mouth (mo) at the top of the panel is anterior, and the arm bud pairs (1–4) are arrayed peripherally. The folds of the collar (co) and the prospective funnel (fo, ff) fall at intermediate positions. c–f The growth of the organ systems by stage 10 is illustrated in end on (c), anterior (d), posterior (e) and left side (f) views. g–m The shape of the adult octopus emerges at middle (g–l) and late (m) embryonic stages. Illustrated are anterior (g and j), posterior (h and k) and left side (i and l) views of stage 13 (g–i) and stage 18 (j–l) embryos, and an anterior view of a stage 19 embryo (m). n and o Anterior views of O. bimaculoides (n) and its brain (o) at hatching (stage 20). A, anterior view; ey, eye; fun, funnel; gil, gill; L, lateral view; olf, olfactory organ; opt, optic lobe; P, posterior view; pf, funnel pouch; st, statocyst; supes, supraesophageal mass. Scale bars: 1mm (a), 500 μm (b–o)
Shigeno et al. Zoological Letters (2015) 1:26
The Bundyloons, the militia who took over the Malheur refuge. I at least had a pleasant companion in my wilderness adventure, but these guys…it’s turning all Lord of the Flies out there in Burns, Oregon.
Rumors and harsh facts arriving from outside the grounds of an Oregon nature preserve appear to be roiling the armed militants who have taken over a federal building in hopes of sparking an armed confrontation with government agents.
At least one of the militants, Joe “Capt. O” Oshaugnessy, left the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge amid drinking claims after arguing with participants over bringing their wives and children to the standoff, and another — Brian “Booda” Cavalier — left the compound after news reports revealed he had lied about serving in the military.
A former compatriot-turned-opponent claims one of the most prominent militants, Blaine Cooper, sucker-punched one of his friends — sending the counter-protester to the hospital with a concussion and serious facial injuries.
Has anybody thought to send them a conch, yet?
There has been a bit of silence here because my mad wife decided she wanted to go camping. In Minnesota. In the middle of January. I know winter camping is a thing, it’s just not my thing, but I went along. So we headed off to Glacier Lakes State Park yesterday, where she’d reserved a snug little cabin for the evening.
Strangely, the DNR link above advertises the place with lots of pictures of beautiful meadows and sparkling lakes and groves of wild flowers. For some reason, they don’t tell you what it’s like in January. It’s like this.
Skies like spilled milk. The lakes are sheets of ice, covered with snow. The trees are barren and skeletal. Which isn’t unlovely, in its own way, but it’s not how I picture camping (which is more gray, with constant drizzling rain, and bears.)
It wasn’t bad. We settled in, we later went to bed, and we turned off the lights, and discovered something else about the experience.
Total darkness and silence. We were far from anywhere, there were no other campers, the heavy cloud cover meant the moon and stars weren’t shining through at all. I held my hand up to my face, and saw nothing. I waited an hour, for my eyes to adjust…still nothing. There was no wind, and no animals were crazy enough to be out and about, so there was no sound, either. So this is what a sensory deprivation tank might be like.
It turns out I do not cope well with sensory deprivation. I was lying there awake all night, my brain churning away trying to find something outside itself to latch on to, and refusing to go to sleep until it heard a little noise or got a faint glimmering of something. I don’t know whether it was claustrophobia or agoraphobia, but something about being swaddled in dark emptiness was unsettling.
So next time my wife demands that I share her madness, I’m bringing a metronome and a night light. I’m kind of wrecked for the day now, too, and am suddenly noticing more acutely the tick of the clock here at home, the occasional distant swish of a car driving through the snow, and all the clutter in our house.
In his little weekly radio homily, Ken Ham makes an amazing claim about the Bible. After pointing out that scientists have had different interpretations of Neandertal’s relationship to modern humans, he claims that the Bible has all the answers.
They wouldn’t be surprised if they started with God’s word. You see, when we start with the Bible and not Man’s ideas about the past, we get a very different view of Neandertals. They were human. And we know that Neandertals were intelligent descendants of Adam and Eve, just like us.
He has a Bible that contains a phylogeny of Neandertals? Remarkable.
Actually, the basis of his claim is that Neandertals are the remains of people who died in the flood; that they were not on Noah’s ark, but all “kinds” were on the big boat; therefore they had to belong to a “kind” already represented on the Ark, which means they had to be human. So he really doesn’t have any information from the Bible that supports his claim that they’re humans, but only a flawed chain of inference. We’d have to argue that Australopithecines were also fully human, because they also all died in the Flood, according to Ham’s own claim of perfect representation of all “kinds” on the boat, and therefore Adam and Eve were the ancestors of Lucy, as well.
It’s rather illogical, too. The reason he says the Bible explains Neandertals is that the Bible says absolutely nothing about Neandertals, so he has complete freedom to claim that whatever parts of science he likes are already inferrable from the tea leaves. The Bible also says nothing about other hominins; about tomatoes; about genes; about the circulation of blood in the human body; about the planet Neptune; about signal transduction in cells. The absence of an explanation is being treated as an explanation-shaped hole he can fill with whatever he wants.
Meanwhile, biblical cosmology treats the Earth as a disc of terra firma floating in a vast universe filled with water.
This is a monument to lab rats in Novosibirsk, Russia. I think it’s adorable.
In other news from Russia, our daughter Skatje is deep in Siberia, and has been incommunicado for a while. We got a quick note letting us know that she is approaching Vladivostok, but a more thorough debriefing will have to come after she gets home next week.
There’s a refugee crisis going on. Desperate people are struggling to reach Europe, crossing the ocean in leaky rafts and boats with their families.
Desperate is not stupid, though, so there’s a booming market in Turkey for life jackets.
A market. People willing to pay for a little safety. You know what this means, right?
Turkish police have uncovered a factory producing fake lifejackets, shining a light on a booming cottage industry that has emerged as a byproduct of the refugee crisis and heightened the risks for those hoping to reach Europe by sea.
Police allegedly seized 1,263 lifejackets filled with non-buoyant materials from an illegal workshop in Izmir that employed two Syrian children, according to Agence France-Presse and Dogan news agencies.
The raid came in the same week that the bodies of more than 30 people washed up on Turkish beaches, having drowned in their attempt to reach Greece. Some of the dead were pictured wearing lifejackets, leading to suspicions that they may have been fake.
I think I need a stronger word than “suck”.
