Oklahoma ain’t Christian enough for Jim Inhofe

He’s in a snit. He refuses to participate in Tulsa’s Holiday Parade of Lights because it doesn’t have “christmas” in the title.

“I did not do so last year because I’m not going to ride in a Christmas parade that doesn’t recognize Christmas,” he said. “I am hopeful that the good people of Tulsa and the city’s leadership will demand a correction to this shameful attempt to take Christ, the true reason for our celebration, out of the parade’s title. Until the parade is again named the Christmas Parade of Lights, I will not participate.”

What a silly man. The parade, by the way, is on 11 December…which last I heard, is not Christmas.

Our Republican choices

So North Korea is rattling the sabre again, and I’m hoping some serious, mature people on our side will step up and act responsibly…but I’m pretty sure we won’t find those people on the Republican side. So far, their responses range from the stupid to the evil.

Here’s Sarah Palin babbling away on the Glenn Beck show (Can you guess that this is the stupid part of the range?)

CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? […]

PALIN: But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies. We’re bound to by treaty –

CO-HOST: South Korean.

PALIN: Eh, Yeah. And we’re also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.

I really think calling North Korea was nothing but an accidental slip of the tongue, but even without that, the totality of her comments are vacuous, simple-minded chit-chat. And this insipid person wants to be president?

At least she’s better than the odious Glenn Reynolds.

JUST WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW: North Korea fires artillery barrage on South. If they start anything, I say nuke ’em. And not with just a few bombs. They’ve caused enough trouble — and it would be a useful lesson for Iran, too. We can’t afford another Korean war, but hey, we’re already dismantling warheads. . . .

Yeah, because the oppressed people of North Korea deserve to have the flesh seared from their bones in a nuclear hell. You might be able to easily convince me that the ruling dynasty of that sad country deserve it, but civilized people don’t commit such barbarities, and especially don’t commit them indiscriminately against entire populations.

UN priorities are a little screwy

So, various factions at the United Nations have been pushing for anti-blasphemy motions — after all, we can’t go around picking on weak ideas. But do you know who the UN thinks are fair game? Non-heterosexual people.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people were once again subject to the whims of homophobia and religious and cultural extremism this week, thanks to a United Nations vote that removed “sexual orientation” from a resolution that protects people from arbitrary executions. In other words, the UN General Assembly this week voted to allow LGBT people to be executed without cause.

Jesus and Mohammed get a little cranky at the idea of someone being rude to their books of magic spells, but setting a gay man on fire? That’s just an excuse to party.

The United Nations is a wonderful idea in principle, except for the little problem of giving barbarians a vote.

Breathtaking editorial arrogance

A woman wrote an article on LiveJournal, freely available to readers and for her own interests, and then the managing editor of a small magazine picked it up and published it, without notification and without, of course, payment. When the author contacted the editor and pointedly brought up the matter of the ethical lapse, suggesting that compensation could be in the form of a donation to the Columbia School of Journalism, the editor, Judith Griggs, condescendingly wrote back with this load of tripe:

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.

But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!

Whoa. Patronizing, critical snark from the wicked witch who plainly stole somebody else’s work for her personal gain. By the way, apparently the bits that needed editing were literal transcriptions of 16th century spellings from an old cookbook which the editor updated, not flaws in the author’s writing.

Just to add a little extra irony to the whole affair, Judith Griggs’ email had this signature:

This electronic message may contain information privileged for the addressee only.
Please be advised that the Cooks Source email addressee is not intended to be transferred to any other addressor, and any copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is prohibited.

I think Ms Griggs is about to discover that her snootiness is going to be transferred, copied, and distributed to a greater extant than she imagined.

Islamic apologetics in the International Journal of Cardiology

I’ve run into this particular phenomenon many times: the True Believer in some musty ancient mythology tells me that his superstition is true, because it accurately described some relatively modern discovery in science long before secular scientists worked it out. It’s always some appallingly stupid interpretation of a vaguely useless piece of text that wouldn’t have made any sense until it was retrofitted to modern science. My particular field of developmental biology has been particularly afflicted with this nonsense, thanks to one man, Dr. Keith L. Moore, of the University of Toronto. He’s the author or co-author on several widely used textbooks in anatomy and embryology — and they are good and useful books! — but he’s also an idiot. He has published ridiculous claims that the Qur’an contains inexplicably detailed descriptions of the stages of human development, implying some sort of divine source of information.

I’ve mentioned this before. For instance, the old book claims that at one point the embryo looks like a piece of chewed gum, or mudghah, and Moore announces, “by golly, it does, sorta”, throwing away all the knowledge we have about the structure and appearance of the actual embryo, which is not a chewed lump. I’ve actually seen these kooks show pictures of a piece of gum and an embryo and declare that they are similar. It’s insane. It’s pareidolia run amuck and swamping out actual scientific information for the sake of propping up useless superstitions.

Here’s Moore himself, endorsing the divinity of Allah on the basis of mudghah.

You may not have heard of him before, but I regularly get email from Muslims telling me that as a developmental biologist, I ought to follow Islam because of its insights into embryology, which don’t exist. Thanks, Dr Moore, you dumbass.

Well, now the Muslim cranks have another coup, having persuaded some other dumbasses to publish an appallingly bad paper in the International Journal of Cardiology, a credible peer-reviewed journal. Or, at least, formerly credible.

The paper is disgracefully bad. It’s basically a compendium of an assortment of references to anatomy and health from the Qur’an, endorsing them as accurate sources of information. For instance, the Qur’an prescribes three techniques for healing, “honey, cupping, and cauterization,” and gosh, we now know that “Honey contains the therapeutic contents sugars, vitamins, anti-microbials, among other things”!

Are you impressed yet?

Since this is a cardiology journal, the article also finds it necessary to waste the readers’ time with blather about blood and arteries. Here’s an example of the Prophet’s profound knowledge of the circulatory system.

Another great vessel mentioned in the Qur’an is the Al-Aatín or aorta “We would certainly have seized his right hand and cut off his Al-Watín,” [20]. Al-Watín has been translated into different, yet similar words, including “aorta”, “life-artery”, and simply “artery”. This verse is taken to mean that if the Prophet Mohammed was lying about the teachings of God, then God would have grabbed the Prophet Mohammad’s arm and cut a vital artery, certainly killing Mohammad. This verse confirms that 1. Blood was indeed viewed as a vehicle for life and 2. The artery directly leading from the heart is vital to survival. By analyzing the different translations and exegesis of Al-Watín, it can be safely assumed that it is the aorta that the author of the Qur’an is referring to in this verse.

Hmmm. So a warlike society that had many soldiers running about chopping into people with swords was aware that cutting major arteries would lead to rapid blood loss and death. I have no idea how they could have figured that out without an omniscient god whispering the explanation into the ears of priests.

The holy book also talks about heart disease, something else a readership of cardiologists would find interesting. Does this sound like well-informed medicine to you?

The Qur’an shares with the Hadeeth a metaphorical description of the heart as a possessor of emotional faculties, thus giving the heart many characteristics that modern science attributes to the brain. As is popularly stated in Islamic culture, every action is dependent upon intentions, and “…what counts is [to God] the intention of your hearts…”. These actions, whether “good” or “bad” determine the health of the heart, namely if it is a sound or diseased heart. A diseased heart is one filled with qualities such as doubt, hypocrisy, and ignorance among many others. Possessors of such qualities have a “hardened,” diseased heart. Other malaise qualities contributing to a diseased heart includes blasphemy, rejection of truth, deviation, sin, corruption, aggressiveness, negligence, fear, anger, and jealousy, among others.

The authors of the Qur’an and of this paper seem to have confused poetic metaphor with science.

Yeah, the article also repeats Moore’s nonsense about embryology. There’s much, much more: read the original paper for yourself, or this excellent critique that also points out all the conveniently omitted parts where the Qur’an gets everything completely wrong.

How did this crap manage to get published? Once again, we have a disgraceful failure of peer-review to weed out obvious religious propaganda, allowing an Islamic tract to appear under the guise of a scientific article. Just the fact that the references consist almost entirely of citations to pages of the Qur’an ought to have triggered some concern. I’d like to know what went wrong in the reviewing process that allowed garbage like this to make it onto the pages of the International Journal of Cardiology. Write to the editor and demand an accounting; also make them squirm in embarrassment and appreciate the damage that has been done to their credibility.

And remember: ancient holy books are sources of lies and misinformation, not science.

Loukas M, et al, The heart and cardiovascular system in the Qur’an and Hadeeth, Int J Cardiol (2009), doi:10.1016/j. ijcard.2009.05.011

Arkansans…are you aware of the shame brought on your state?

These are the words of Clint McCance, a school board member in the Midland school district of Arkansas. He was a little bit annoyed that people in his school were wearing purple in remembrance of students who had been bullied into suicide.

Being a fag doesn’t give you the right to ruin the rest of our lives. If you get easily offended by being called a fag then don’t tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself. It pisses me off though that we make a special purple fag day for them. I like that fags cant procreate. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die.

Huh. This is the kind of person Arkansans elect to run their schools? And he hasn’t been tossed off the board yet? How…interesting.

There’s a facebook page calling for his firing as well as an online petition. If you want to get more personal (but polite!), it’s easy to find the contact information for the school district. They already have a disclaimer on their web page, but I don’t think that’s a sufficient response to such flaming bigotry.

Boys will be…revolting misogynists

This is a very poor quality recording of a group of fraternity pledges marching about the Yale campus chanting. You should be able to make out what they’re chanting, though: “No means yes, yes means anal.”

These privileged man-children made it a point to march past various sororities letting the women know exactly what to expect from the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity; the president of the frat has since apologized, calling it a “lapse in judgment”.

I don’t think so. I think it goes deeper than that: this was a lifelong failure, the result of a poor upbringing that generates bully-boys who think that terrorizing women with threats of rape is hilarious, and further, a culture that looks on these beasts and forgives them, urging them to go on and bring their misogynistic attitudes to their future careers as captains of industry and masters of politics.

This is not a free speech issue. Of course DKE is free to advertise the fact that they are a slimy nest of anti-woman vermin; one could even argue that they’re doing everyone a favor by making it clear that their frat is the one for low-life scum. But when the Yale University administration sits quietly, waiting for the furor to die down, and when they foster such unconscionable behavior by their students, we’re also free to suggest that maybe Yale isn’t a fit place for our sons and daughters, and maybe that Yale degree should carry a certain amount of social stigma.

As if it weren’t already bearing a mark of shame for being George W. Bush’s alma mater…

The image of evangelical Christianity: the Insane Clown Posse

They’ve come out. They’ve revealed that all along, the Insane Clown Posse were evangelical Christians making Christian rap. Isn’t it obvious with hindsight now?

It’s a hilarious interview. The reporter gets them to spill the beans about exactly what they were thinking in some of their notorious lyrics. I love how he bonds with them.

“I don’t know how magnets work,” I say, to put him at his ease.

“Nobody does, man!” he replies, relieved. “Magnetic force, man. What else is similar to that on this Earth? Nothing! Magnetic force is fascinating to us. It’s right there, in your fucking face. You can feel them pulling. You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t touch it. But there’s a fucking force there. That’s cool!”

Shaggy says the idea for the lyrics came when one of the ICP road crew brought some magnets into the recording studio one day and they spent ages playing with them in wonderment.

“Gravity’s cool,” Violent J says, “but not as cool as magnets.”

I also have a new understanding of science. It just doesn’t get better than this:

“Ah!” I gesticulate. “If you’re explaining to your five-year-old son what fog is, then why do you not want to meet scientists? Because they’re just like you, explaining things to people…”

“Well,” Violent J says, “science is… we don’t really… that’s like…” He pauses. Then he waves his hands as if to say, “OK, an analogy”: “If you’re trying to fuck a girl, but her mom’s home, fuck her mom! You understand? You want to fuck the girl, but her mom’s home? Fuck the mom. See?”

I look blankly at him. “You mean…”

“Now, you don’t really feel that way,” Violent J says. “You don’t really hate her mom. But for this moment when you’re trying to fuck this girl, fuck her! And that’s what we mean when we say fuck scientists. Sometimes they kill all the cool mysteries away. When I was a kid, they couldn’t tell you how pyramids were made…”

“Like Stonehenge and Easter Island,” says Shaggy. “Nobody knows how that shit got there.”

“But since then, scientists go, ‘I’ve got an explanation for that.’ It’s like, fuck you! I like to believe it was something out of this world.”

ICP seriously thought that when they released that goofy video about magnets that everyone would say, “Wow, I didn’t know Insane Clown Posse could be deep like that.” Apparently, for ICP, that line about not knowing how magnets work actually was the deepest bit of philosophy they’d ever contemplated.

I’d explain more but, you know, dudes and dudettes…your mom. I gots some bizness with her I got to take care of first.

Grow up, Gateshead

How can you simultaneously be such leaders of advancing secularism and pandering cowards to the demands of religion? The police have arrested 6 people who posted a video of a Koran-burning. They did not break into a mosque and steal somebody else’s book, they had their own copy and destroyed it … they did nothing illegal. But they’re still arrested, and the police are making excuses.

In a joint statement, Northumbria Police and Gateshead Council said: “The kind of behaviour displayed in this video is not representative of our community as a whole.

Our community is one of mutual respect and we continue to work together with community leaders, residents and people of all faiths and beliefs to maintain good community relations.”

Oh, bugger that. If you want to maintain good community relations, you do it be allowing every member freedom of conscience in all matters that do not cause harm to others. You do not accomplish an atmosphere of tolerance by telling one group that they have the privilege of imposing their religious requirements on everyone else.

That settles it. I have a copy of the Koran at home right now. I will not have a copy tomorrow, because I will not respect a religion of such intolerance enough to allow their propaganda a space on my bookshelf.

And if I had a relic representative of the pious ninnies on the Gateshead city council, I’d destroy that too.

Stupidity has a toll

California has had zero deaths from whooping cough in the last 55 years.

The toll this year: 9 babies dead of whooping cough. So far.

There is something about that link above that makes me angry. The source given for the terrible statistic is the Huffington Post — a site which has done far more than its share to promulgate lies and fear about vaccination, and which should bear a portion of the guilt for those dead children.