Flaming Cheerios: a weapon of mass destruction

The Smoking Gun has a hilarious video of a guy with a blowtorch and a box of Cheerios. It turns out that cheerios burn really well, and he set the lawn of General Mills on fire.

But there’s also a sad part. The event took place in Minnesota; I hate being reminded that I’m surrounded by stupid people. The guy with a blowtorch is Mike Leisner, and wouldn’t you know it…he’s doing this to protest the policies of tolerance practiced at General Mills, because he has a hard-on for the gays; he hates ’em, and thinks we all ought to, too. He’s been preaching hatred on youtube for some time.

He had a youtube channel called “Live4Chr1st” (wouldn’t you know he’d have to be a raving Christian nutcase?), but no more. It’s been taken down. He works as a real estate agent for Greater Midwest Properties — it’ll be interesting to see how long that lasts.

But I will try to look on the bright side. We have a referendum coming up in November on gay marriage in Minnesota; it helps that the opponents are such embarrassing fools. I’m also thinking that when the Revolution comes, I should stock up on boxes of Cheerios, rather than molotov cocktails.

Nothing can stop Pat Robertson from leaping to a foregone conclusion

Oh, wow: guess who was to blame for the Sikh temple shooting? According to Pat Robertson, it was atheists!

I love how he piously deplores all violence against anyone worshipping god, without concern for which god they’re praying towards. As long as they’re not Muslim, I guess!

By the way, the murderer was “a neo-Nazi skinhead in the very thick of the white supremacist movement” who talked about racial holy war. I don’t think atheism was his motive.

I think I’m beginning to hate gun culture

I haven’t even glanced at that awful Instahack’s blog in years, and now I am reminded why. Here’s what he has to say about the recent murders at a Sikh temple:

The 6 Sikh temple shooting victims identified; Satwant Singh Kaleka died trying to fight off shooter. Heroic. But it’s too bad he didn’t have a gun.

What? So it’s Kaleka’s fault because he wasn’t carrying a gun? In a temple?

In Instahack’s world, are we supposed to be armed everywhere?

Creationist sophistry

Did you know that only animals are alive? Bacteria, fungi, and protists…also not alive. This is according to Henry Morris III, creationist. He makes this argument by specifying certain criteria, rather arbitrarily and independent of anything biology has to say — the four things that determine whether something is alive are:

  • It’s unique. I know, that sounds like it ought to apply to plants, but that’s not really the criterion: after saying “Life is unique”, he explains that it’s because the Bible used the Hebrew word “chay” 763 times, and never applies it to plants. Therefore, the reason plants aren’t alive is Hebrew word use patterns.

  • Life has independent movement. So things that twitch and crawl are alive, plants don’t, therefore they aren’t. Also, the Bible uses the Hebrew word “ramas” for movement 17 times, and never applies it to plants. Therefore, the reason plants aren’t alive is Hebrew word use patterns.

  • Life has blood. God sent a clear message by rejecting Cain’s offering of plants — He demands blood sacrifice, nothing else will do. The more potent blood comes from people; the blood of bulls and goats was not sufficient to take away human sins, which was why Jesus had to be sacrificed.

    OK, this argument is just ghoulish. His best argument for why plants aren’t alive is that you can’t butcher them to get blood which will magically cure sins?

  • Life has soul and spirit. So this criterion is for something we can’t see or measure in any way — if recognition of my life is dependent on having a “soul”, then I guess I’m dead already. And once again, Morris pointlessly tells us that the Bible uses the word “nephesh” 753 times and “ruwach” 389 times, never applying it to a plant. Therefore, the reason plants aren’t alive is Hebrew word use patterns.

The only thing this whole mess persuades me of is that creationists are even dumber than I thought.

But I do have to say one thing to his essay’s credit: I agreed with the conclusion.

If God designed death into creation, then death is as “good” as all other factors—and the atheistic evolutionary doctrine is right. Death is the “good” force that brings about the ultimate “fittest” in our universe. Death, therefore, is not “the wages of sin,” and our Lord Jesus’ death was not necessary for salvation—it was just the wasted effort of a deluded martyr.

These teachings cannot be harmonized. Either the Bible is Truth (capitalization intended) or it is Error. The choice is clear. The message is clear. The effect is eternal!

The answer is clear. Jesus was a deluded martyr. It is Error.

The Jack D. Ripper School of Reproductive Biology

So I got in this odd twitter argument — arguing against a point so stupid, so against reason and biology, that I didn’t bother to bring it up here. The source of this argument was an MRA site, AVoiceForMen (home to the odious JohnTheOther and Paul Elam, if you recall), and the discussion was about the relative biological cost of sex. The standard biological view is that sex is cheap for men, and expensive for women; men produce numerous small, cheap gametes, most of which are disposable and thrown away, and do not have to bear the cost of pregnancy and lactation, and can often dodge the bother of child-rearing altogether, while women produce very few large, metabolically expensive gametes, and by necessity bear all the costs of pregnancy and lactation. And of course, in our culture, they also get saddled with most of the work of raising children.

The MRA argument was a perverse inversion of reality. It argued that men are the costly sex, because they have to ejaculate their precious sperm during intercourse, while the ladies just lie there and have fun.

We have this attitude toward hookup culture because we are convinced that male sexuality has no value. Not even no value, we think male sexuality has negative value.

Men sow their seed hither and yon; women guard their vaginas like Fort Knox.

But is this true?

Let’s think about it logically. With each act of sex a male ejaculates semen into the female. This is an investment of physical resources that takes time for the male to replenish. So male animals are limited in how often they can have reproductively viable sex. Female animals, on the other hand, are not. The sex act has zero cost to them.

Now, the reason this obvious truth is invisible to us is because we lump in the cost of carrying young with the cost of sex. Yes, carrying young is high female investment but the sex act itself is higher male investment.

It really is the ‘precious bodily fluids’ argument presented seriously. Men are the ones who should guard their essence, while women shouldn’t care.

Why? Because, quite simply, his sperm is in limited supply. He wants to prioritize delivery of sperm to a.) high quality females and b.) less mated females.

I don’t even…

Men spontaneously produce approximately 100,000,000 sperm cells per day. We make them whether we have sex or not. They have a limited shelf life; there is good evidence that mature internally stored sperm begin to decline in quality after about a week.

There is no sperm shortage at all.

Women, on the other hand, produce one gamete per month. If you want to make the “limited supply” argument, and an economic claim that a scarce commodity will be marketed much, much more carefully, it ought to be applied not to the menz but to the womenz. And also note that the only way the author can make her (yes, her) claim at all is by intentionally neglecting all the costs of pregnancy.

There are a couple of commenters there arguing with this patently bogus rationalization — it would be hard not to, it’s so absurd — but other commenters are just unbelievably gullible.

Epicness sauteed in awesomesauce!

As long as you ignore the fact that it’s, like, wrong.

And if you’re fond of word salad, how about this?

Best written post on Female’s Hypergamy & their polyandrous relationships, Female sexuality is pretty much distorted, When sexual revolution was forced on to become the social and cultural norm, WOMYN in majority never repelled it or rejected it, they gladly accepted it and have made it their daily routine (To fuck more men) their so called pair bonding in ancestral time was “Forced” pair bonding but with new innovations like “NO FAULT” divorce and incentives, cash prizes and child custody they are now pretty busy shaking up more dicks after breaking up with their “now” ex’s.

But overall MGTOW are catching up with that, Maybe PUA are mindless drones but even though male sexuality is also becoming more like female sexuality, Even more males are now calling out their inner “ape” or “gorilla” because of this new CULTURAL and SOCIAL Norm of sexual revolution, but as i said Women were the starter of all this insanity and they are now reaping what they sow.

I’m sorry, but I feel queasy at the thought of linking to AVoiceForMen (officially declared a hate site by the SPLC!), but here’s another article that effectively shreds their idiocy. Read that instead.

Hey, Thunderf00t fans: stuff it!

Ah, it’s another bright crisp summer morning, and I wake up to birds singing, the distant sound of the freight train moving through Morris, and the mad dinging of my email software, alerting me that there’s another flood of new hate mail on twitter, on youtube, and in my mail. Yes, it is August, and Thunderf00t has created a new video denouncing feminism. And me. And the accusations flooding in are so stupid and so wrong. I shall address them one more time, and then, please, slip on your nicest toe shoes and tutu and pirouette up your own anuses.

Here are a few of the bloody idiotic complaints I get.

  • “I am so disgusted with you and your war with Thunderf00t.” Aside from this post here, today, I have completely ignored Thunderf00t for the last several weeks. He, on the other hand, is making videos and twitter comments about me. There are certain people who, I think, don’t understand the internet: if I made a post two weeks ago or a month ago or a year ago, it persists. It doesn’t mean I’m sitting here right now, obsessing over something I wrote yesterday, even.

  • “How dare you violate Thunderf00t’s right to free speech!” This one is especially ironic, given that it’s made in response to Thunderf00t blithering away loudly and freely on the internet, again. We’ve done nothing to compromise his ability to express himself. We have said that this organization does not support his views, and will not give him our space or resources to do so.

  • “You and Rebecca Watson banned Thunderf00t!” No, we didn’t. We refused to support Thunderf00t’s dumbass crusade against feminism on our blog network. Also, do you realized that freethoughtblogs.com and skepchick.org are completely different entities? Rebecca Watson has no input at all on our management, and vice versa.

  • “You banned Thunderf00t for simply disagreeing with you!” No, we get disagreement all the time, and bloggers here have issues with each other frequently. What Thunderf00t was fired for was joining a network he clearly detested and immediately launching a campaign to tell everyone to stop talking about subjects he didn’t like. He hates freethoughtblogs, in case it wasn’t clear to you by now, so why the hell did he join at all? If it was to undermine it from within, his overt antagonism from day two onward made it clear he wasn’t going to be persuasive in the slightest. Dumbest fifth columnist ever.

  • “You promised you wouldn’t meddle with what he wrote!” Yes, and we didn’t. We didn’t edit or censor one word that he wrote: his blog is still here, completely intact and untouched. What we didn’t promise is that we’d give him space on our network forever and ever. I know he’s fond of complaining in academic terms about this, so digest this: he was never granted tenure here. He doesn’t get to complain that his tenure contract was violated, because didn’t have one. Now maybe if he’d built up some social capital with us, and demonstrated some ability to make an intelligent contribution, we’d have been more reluctant to let him go…but he didn’t, and showed no interest in doing so. He had no friends among the established bloggers here, and didn’t want any. That wasn’t a very collegial attitude.

Let me add one more thing: there’s this unfortunate idea that these attacks have to be personalized and focus on just me. I’m the guy who recruited Thunderf00t to join the network. He immediately raised the hackles of just about everyone here; we had a review committee that looked over his raw contempt for everything here, and the pile of disgusted emails we were getting, and his atrociously childish writing, and said, “Uh-oh, this was a huge mistake, this guy does not belong here.” And I was then the guy who asked everyone to hold off on kicking him out, he’ll settle down and start writing good stuff. And then he didn’t. And he didn’t. And he got worse. And every day I felt guiltier and guiltier, not to Thunderf00t but to this collective here where we’ve otherwise done such a good job in gathering good, intelligent writers…so when the whole group decided they could take no more of his abuse, I volunteered to deliver the axe in expiation. I was Thunderf00t’s sole advocate here (my big mistake). If you have a beef here, it’s not just with me, it’s with the whole damn network of about 40 writers who were unhappy to be saddled with a flaming asshole.

Now we’re done. We have been done for a long time. Thunderf00t is not and will not be a part of this network, and it’s quite clear he doesn’t want to be part of it, except to destroy it. I’ve addressed the complaints of his ignorant and indignant followers, so I’m putting it to rest — I’ve blocked him on twitter, I’m not reading his blog or watching his videos, so if you want to complain further, do your posturing for Thunderf00t, not me, because I don’t give a damn.

A re-poll

You know how much I despise internet polls — they’re meaningless and biased, they draw on an already biased sample, and they tend to be so badly worded that their results are uninterpretable — there is a science of polls and surveys, and these things ignore it all.

Now how about this for an example of anti-scientific thinking: remember that last poll on a standard (but uncomfortably kittenish) scientific procedure? The Mirror didn’t get the result they wanted, so now they’re re-running the poll. Yeah, that’s valid. I want to shoot craps against these guys: every time I get a bad roll, I’ll just say I want a do-over.

This is exactly the same article and the same poll, they just reposted it with a new title: “Kitten controversy: 46% of people say stitching up kittens’ eyes for science is OK.”

Is the scientific experiment on kittens acceptable?

Yes 35.85%

No 64.15%

If we add more yes votes, will they just do it over again a third time? What fraction of “yes” votes do they consider acceptable?

No contest

If you thought Bambi vs. Godzilla was funny, you might want to witness AronRa battling Pastor Bob Enyart. I give you one representative sample of the back-and-forth:

AronRa wrote:Ignoring for a moment the thousands of creationist arguments which have all been proven wrong a thousand times, yet are still being presented on YEC websites around the world, can you show me one verifiably accurate argument, positively indicative of miraculous creation over biological evolution?

Enyart wrote:The 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics does not invalidate evolution. Evolution relies on thermodynamic laws.

How not to respond to a Rethuglican

Ugh. Witness thuggish wingnut James Taranto’s comment on the killings in Colorado.


I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice.

Perhaps he’d like to judge? Is he going to ask this question of every case where a person puts themselves in harm’s way to defend a loved one? What criterion is he going to use to define “worthy”?

That’s a repulsive sentiment he’s expressing, and seems to reflect a lack of empathy and an inability to imagine any kind of sacrifice without hauling out a ledger sheet to calculate its value. Not nice.

But then I read one of the first comments on the article at dKos highlighting Taranto’s sliminess. And I was ugh’ed out again!

I was prepared for a worthy rant. Apologies, should have known better. If another nitwit does something similar, refer them to Heinlein. Heinlein wrote “anycountry that does not place women and children first” as part of it’s values is a unethical country. (I am paraphrasing.)

Women take nine months to make a baby. Men take minutes. That fact prompted Heinlein’s writing.

Heinlein???!? Jebus, that man was an unrepentant sexist pig himself; I recoiled from his later books when I was 15, because they were too crudely horny and repellently attached to sexist stereotypes. When I was 15, and juiced on testosterone myself! Also, I was even then learning to dislike what would become a typical libertarian mindset.

But to respond to a challenge to women’s worth by declaring the importance of their baby-making abilities…talk about missing the whole point.