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…

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.

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.

A quick note

You must read today’s xkcd: The Pace of Modern Life. That’s all, gotta go.

I just had to pluck out one example.

The managers of sensational newspapers…do not try to educate their readers and make them better, but tend to create perverted tastes and develop vicious tendencies. The owners of these papers seem to have but one purpose, and that is to increase their circulation.

They do it for the blog hits.

Knowing a little history clarifies issues

We’ve had this long-simmering football controversy here in the upper midwest — a North Dakota football team named itself after an Indian tribe. They try to argue that it’s not racist and claim that it’s a respectful homage to the natives, but look at the history of such naming elsewhere: the Washington DC football team name is unabashedly racist.

This Washington football team was named by one of the most vehement racists in the history of American professional sports. When George Marshall bought the team in 1932, they were called the Boston Braves. He changed the name — to a slur, because he was a racist — and moved them to Washington. He made “Dixie” one of the team’s fight songs and refused to hire black players well into the 1960s. The NFL integrated in 1946 but Marshall’s team held out until the federal government actually forced them to field black players in 1963. The all-white Washington teams of the 1950s and 1960s were among the worst in the league, but segregation was more important to Marshall than winning football games. The NFL had actually already been raciallyintegrated until black players were suddenly banned in 1933. Interviews with owners suggest that Marshall was responsible for the ban.

This is the man who named the team and white supremacy and racism obviously informed his every decision. In his will he insisted that his foundation not spend any money on “any purpose which supports or employs the principle of racial integration in any form.” It is extremely hard to believe that this man selected the name — specially changed the name from a less offensive term for American Indians to this term — to “honor” anyone, the usual argument used by the team’s modern defenders.

The current owner has vowed to never change the name, and is desperately working to build up some PR spin to cover his butt. So what does he do?

The Washington DC-area NFL franchise has commissioned veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz to conduct some focus groups to see how American football fans feel about the franchise’s name, which is a vile racial slur.

Oh, yeah. When you want to whitewash racism, you call the professionals: a Republican apparatchik. Everyone knows that.

If you read some of the linked articles, you’ll discover that one of the reasons the team refuses to change their name is that they did a poll…and found that Americans preferred that they keep their racist name, 9:1. Are we at all surprised? And is it any wonder that they’ve now hired a Republican pollster to skew the bias even more?

People have been treating other people horribly for a long, long time

Those English…they have bodies buried in their basements. Here’s this lovely little farm in Kent, which looks quite ordinary, except that it’s the site of an archaeological dig.


View Larger Map

And what lies beneath it? Why, evidence of grisly ritual murders carried out over centuries, a few thousand years ago.

Respectful Late Bronze Age burial in England is typically urned cremation in closely clustered cemeteries. The treatment of the bodies deposited in the Cliffs End pit complex is strikingly deviant. Basically what they’re doing here is killing people and livestock, manipulating their remains ritually, often exposing them on site for a time, and finally inhuming them in pits. Bone preservation is perfect, leaving it all too clear what is going on. And it goes on for 800 years, well into the Middle Iron Age about 200 cal BC.

…

More than half of the victims are foreigners. And though more than a third are locals, we don’t know if their parents were locals as DNA hasn’t been done yet. Who travels like this in the 1st millennium BC? Certainly not tourists. Traders do travel, but for a community dependent on long-distance bronze deliveries, it would not be a sustainable strategy to ambush and kill the traders – never mind that these were in all likelihood well organised and armed. My guess is that we’re dealing with slave raiding and slave trade. Goods travelled, and one valuable commodity was slaves. All valuable commodities were appropriate as sacrifices to the gods when that time came.

In the case of the well-travelled old woman, I imagine her being taken from her tribe in southern Norway by Scottish slave raiders, growing up in Scotland, and then being traded on maturity to a Kentish tribe with odd religious practices. She probably gives birth to more slaves there (perhaps a few of the recovered individuals with local isotope signatures) and lives most of her adult life at Cliffs End. Not as a member of the clan, but as property of a clan member. And then comes that final Beltane feast out by the barrows.

I understand the British have mostly gotten better since then, and that the Norwegians wreaked their vengeance a thousand years after they were getting raided by slavers.