South Dakotans are obsessed with anal sex

I always suspected as much — they’re a bit strange over there, 40 miles to my west. Steve Hickey, one of those state legislators in Sioux Falls (and a Republican, of course) was compelled to write a long screed ranting about the public health dangers of gay sex by this event:

Hickey told TPM on Wednesday he was driven to write the letter after Nancy Robrahn and Jennie Rosenkranz, a lesbian couple from Rapid City, S.D., announced their intention to become the first state residents to challenge its gay marriage ban. The couple was married on Saturday in Minnesota in a wedding that was officiated by Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, setting the stage for South Dakota to become the 29th with a marriage equality court case.

Two lesbians getting married drove him to think horrible thoughts about anal sex. That doesn’t even make sense. If he’s going to rant about the public health risks of sex, he ought to know that it is lesbians who have the safest sex lives.

Here’s his wretched letter in full. The comments are full of praise for his brave stance.

A One Way Alley for the Garbage Truck

Rep. Steve Hickey, District 9, Sioux Falls

Consider this an open letter to the medical and psychological communities in South Dakota. The subject is homosexuality, which is about to be a front-page topic for the next few years in our state. I’m asking the doctors who practice in our state, is the science really settled on this issue or is it more the case that you feel silenced and intimidated?

Certainly there are board-certified doctors in our state who will attest to what seems self-evident to so many: gay sex is not good for the body or mind. Pardon a crude comparison but regarding men with men, we are talking about a one-way alley meant only for the garbage truck to go down. Frankly, I’d question the judgment of doctor who says it’s all fine.

South Dakota docs, it’s time for you to come out of the closet and give your professional opinion on this matter like you capably and responsibly do on all the others. Somehow the message we are presently getting from the medical community is that eating at McDonalds will kill us but the gay lifestyle has no side effects. Truth be told it seems self-evident the list of side effects would read far longer than anything we hear on a Cialis commercial.

If many are indeed wearying of our religious community leading on these morality issues, and believe also those of us in the legislature should butt out too, it’s time for the medical community in our state to be honest with us. If you don’t speak up, this issue will be decided by five unelected judges on the Supreme Court regardless of what states like ours have decided by public vote.

This indeed is a matter of being on the wrong side of history considering that historically, homosexuality has been a notable marker of the downfall of past civilizations, not their rise. It’s not hate for a physician to speak up about something that is harmful to human health. It is not unloving to tell people you don’t have to have sex with and marry someone to love and be loved by them. As one who performs marriages and counsels couples as part of my professional life, marriage is the last thing I’d recommend to someone who simply wants to be loved and legitimized. What do other health care and mental health professionals in our state really think?

The South Dakota High School Activities Association is presently considering changing the rules to accommodate transgender kids. Forty-one percent of those who struggle with Gender Dysphoria attempt suicide, that’s twenty-five times the rate of the general population– certainly tragic and urgent but not a word from the medical and psychological communities? So really, we are letting our basketball coaches sort it out while ACLU lawyers look carefully over their shoulders!?

Letting boys play girl sports is not the starting place to fix the suicide problem or the very real daily struggle these students face dealing with something they have been handed in life. Society is broken and people have broken identities. Is it really best for us to break down the one remaining thing that has been working in society to try to fix the broken in our midst? And does it really even do that, or does it merely put them in more places exposing them to additional painful ostracization all the while transferring serious anxieties to other innocent and impressionable ones in those locker rooms? We need to have compassion but there are unintended consequences to consider too.

Before we let lawyers and judges decide this for our state and override the will of the people in the 2006 election, I issue a call to the medical and psychological communities and associations to weigh in publicly and timely on the matter of homosexuality and the human body, psyche and family, particular kids.

I thought his ignorance and his fascination with one specific sex act was amusing, until I read the part where this asshole has the gall to use transgender people’s suicide statistics as a blunt instrument to imply there’s something wrong with them, rather than with the poisonous haters like him who make life miserable for them. There is something deeply wrong with society, and it’s represented by the smug Steve Hickeys of the world, not the tortured kids in our schools who are bullied by the bigots.

But otherwise, he’s picking the wrong target. If anal sex repulses him, he shouldn’t do it, but he should also think about who is doing it. Anal sex is the least common sexual activity between gay men — oral sex and mutual masturbation are much more common. Meanwhile, among the majority heterosexual population, about 25% have had anal sex at least once, and 10% do it regularly. If you’re looking for the common link in anal sex, it isn’t homosexuality: it’s the possession of a penis.

I would urge Mr Hickey to rewrite his screed to instead demand that doctors come out of the closet and speak out on the self-evident health risks of having sex with someone who has a penis.

He could also throw in something about how his religion venerates vaginas that are either untainted by the intrusion of a penis, and/or are one way exits for babies. He should specifically mention the Virgin Mary as the perfect example of how god intends that that pathway is best as a one-way street.

Although, do you really believe Mr Hickey is at all motivated by his concerns for the health of his gay constituents? I don’t think so.

James Arjuna, International Spa Design Engineer!

When we bought our house, it came with a disconnected, nonfunctional hot tub. It’s still here, sitting unused in our back yard, because having a mere Ph.D. in biology means that I don’t know how to fix it, and also, I don’t get paid enough to afford to have it fixed by a competent hot tub expert. And thus am I made to realize that I am a failure. I shouldn’t have wasted effort on that lowly science degree; instead, I should have learned how to install hot tubs.

Because hot tub experts are wizards, masters of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time.

I have been reading the works of James Arjuna, International Spa Design Engineer, who is a real scientist. He said so.

I am a real scientist for over 47 years. I make my living producing functional equipment that always works as designed because I don’t use any pseudo science. I hate pseudo science religious crap in academia.

He says so frequently.

Please check out my science blog. It is based on over 47 years of using the scientific method to solve problems and to seek to find what is really true.

Here is where I do most of my recent research. I have read over 41,000 papers on biology, DNA, Evolution, genetics.

I don’t know which science blog to check out, though, since he didn’t provide a link. He has several!

  • Hot Tubs And Spas Blog
  • Education Literacy and Science
  • Science, Religion, Politics What’s More Important?
  • Evolution Science Clarity

41,000 papers is a lot. In 47 years, that’s 2 or 3 papers a day, which is about what I read. It’s hard work reading a science paper with comprehension, so his dedication to biology may be why his hot tub business has some bitter complaints, and why his brother thinks he’s a sleazy con artist. Mastery of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time makes demands on one’s life; sacrifices must be made. This is another mark of my failure; I’m not guilty of bad business practices, and I haven’t alienated either of my brothers yet. I don’t think; maybe I’ll have to ask when I see them next month.

So I looked up Arjuna’s latest science article to learn wisdom and discover the deep secrets of the Hot Tub Masters. In this, he asserts that there is not and never has been a beneficial mutation. His chosen example? The lactose tolerance mutation, because while it may be beneficial, it couldn’t possibly have happened.

The most ridiculous of this is the lactose tolerance mutation. First of all making lactase is made in a gene that is 49,335 base pairs for just one of the THREE lactase genes. This is the most common gene found in lactose intolerance.

First rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Find a big number. Numbers are sciencey, and big ones are hard, and 49,335 sounds scary. How could it be? 49,355 whatevers must be impossible!

According to the article claiming that this was some great event creating this new gene. It turns out that it is only 2 base pares were changed to cause this gene to function. Where did the other totally designed 49332 BP come from that were aligned perfectly and just needed two base pares to change?

Second rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Find a small number. We must trivialize any accomplishment. Only 2 out of that intimidating 49,355? That can’t possibly matter. The scientists will splutter, “but single nucleotide changes can distort the whole shape of a molecule, or disrupt a biochemically active site; and in this case, the modification is to a cis regulatory element which modifies expression, not the sequence of the enzyme”, but you can ignore them, because of the obvious fact that 2 is a lot less than 49,355.

Third rule of the Hot Tub Masters: You are not bounded by any rules. Even though you’re making a strangely irrelevant argument from arithmetic, you can say that 49355 – 2 = 49332, and no one will care. Also, spelling is an oppressive tool of those pinheads in academia.

Fourth rule of the Hot Tub Masters: You can read 41,000 papers on biology, DNA, Evolution, genetics and still not understand basic biology, and that’s OK. The thousands of bases in a gene must be aligned perfectly in your head, whatever that means, and never mind that that is not a rule in reality.

Hot Tub Masters are free spirits. Truth is whatever they say it is.

It was a pre-existing gene from ancient ancestors prior to this finding and they found a group where it was turned off and then a group where they drank milk where it was functioning. The two base pairs were not mutated from disease in the functioning gene and in the malfunctioning gene it was and is a disease.

Fifth rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Consistency be damned. You can simultaneously announce that there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation, and that groups without the mutation are diseased (surprise, lactose intolerant individuals! You are afflicted with a disease!) and that groups that have the mutation are not diseased. And that it wasn’t a mutation anyway.

In the 2.5 million DNA studies there are no cases of any living or recently extinct (6000 yrs on human studies) showing even one verifiable beneficial mutation.

Not one of the PhD’s have been able to produce one. Therefore, there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation. It is fantasy.

But…but James! You’ve only read 41,000 of the 2.5 million studies!

And I am so confused. The Hot Tub Master plainly said that the 2 nucleotide variation was the difference between diseased and not diseased. Even in his own head it’s clearly beneficial to carry that trait.

We know that Evolutionists believe that “duplication” mutations are the “power behind evolution”. But even a base pair duplication causes disease or deformity because it destroys the original proteins construction with extra proteins that cannot be integrated.

Well, a single base pair duplication would be a frame shift mutation, so it certainly would mess up the structure of the protein. But we’re talking about segmental duplications, where a complete copy of the original gene is left intact and a duplicate is made elsewhere.

I don’t even understand what he’s talking about when he says a single base duplication creates extra proteins that cannot be integrated. That makes no sense. It’s almost as if he has no understanding of molecular biology and genetics at all.

But that cannot be! He’s an International Man of Mystery Spa Design Engineer!

They cannot be integrated because the HOX genes have to place them into the correct use and the HOX genes are master programmed for a specific master plan of the organism.

Then they cannot be recognized by the immune system and so the immune system takes the only messed up proteins and attacks them. Every mutation destroys the recognition of both the HOX to use them and the immune system to destroy them as foreign attack cells, that our immune system does not recognize.

I…what? I know a little bit about HOX genes; they don’t control every little thing, every gene in every cell. They set up domains with specific body plan identities in early development. Most genes don’t interact with HOX genes at all, so it’s a little peculiar to claim they limit everything — I’m beginning to think the Hot Tub Master memorized a few buzz words and phrases and is plastering them all over his cartoonish and wrong vision of how gene regulation works.

As for his immune system argument — does he know nothing about how adaptive immunity works? How self/non-self recognition is a product of selection?

James Arjuna is bringing discredit to the noble traditions of the Hot Tub Masters. I suspect that he is not a True Hot Tub Master™, and I’m going to have to look farther for a master of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time. I also think my broken hot tub is going to continue to languish in my back yard, because if his knowledge of hot tubs is as sound as his knowledge of biology, I wouldn’t want him to come near it.

I know I sure can’t do anything about it. I know nothing about hot tubs. Nothing at all.

The Heartland Institute quote-mines George Carlin

Mike the Mad Biologist traces a ‘quote’ from George Carlin that the Heartland Institute has been publicizing. It’s comparable to the worst that creationists do — it takes a Carlinesque rant against “big wealthy business interests that control things” and turns it into a Libertarian complaint about big government by changing a few words and deleting almost all of the text. Knowing Carlin’s angry liberal predilections, it was easy to spot that there was something wrong with Heartland’s quote, but dang if doing the empirical thing and actually laying out the full quote from Carlin wasn’t convincing to a high degree.

That’s another point of the post, too. He cites an article by Ezra Klein making the point that it’s not that liberals are free of bad ideas, but that we have this added value of fact-checking — we have our biases, and we have our loons (anti-vaxxers and anti-GMOs, for instance), but the thing is, we can feel shame if we find out something we’re promoting is empirically incorrect. There is a check on any liberal tendency to drift off into la-la land that is totally absent in Tea Baggers and other far right political nuts. They have no shame, they already know how the world must work, and if you point evidence at them, well, the evidence must be wrong.

It’s also the difference between science and religion. Religion already has their answer, nonsensical as it is, and the evidence must be made to conform. Science has provisional answers, we keep gathering evidence to verify and improve, and we’ll change our theories if the evidence contradicts them.

Stepping in to confirm everything that Mike and Klein said, the very first comment is from someone calling themselves Gubbler who lists four things he considers fact-free liberal fantasies.

  • Racial equality, because black people were selected to be sexy animals, according to Steve Sailer, racist fraud.

  • Global warming might have merit, but any effort to change is hysteria.

  • Gay marriage, because Two guys do fecal penetration and that is the premise for marriage?

  • The liberal belief that OBAMA IS messiah!!!!

Thereby confirming that right-wingers are delusional.

What happens when you accuse racists of being racist?

You get mail. Nicely written, printed letters in the mail. And they confirm everything I said.

So a lot of Fox News viewers have been writing to me lately, expressing their outrage that I would dare to suggest that racist newspapers out to be thrown off campus. And a great many of them have another odd, common thread, something that wasn’t in the Fox News report, but apparently all these rabid tea-baggers have inferred it, and they’re pretty darned insistent that it must be true.

I must be Jewish.

Take it away, Bob in Boca:

bobinboca

“Myers” is not a Jewish name. I wouldn’t be at all put out if I’d had some Jewish ancestry, but I’m afraid that my father’s ancestry has been traced back to the 16th century (mostly Scots/Irish/English ne’er-do-wells living marginal lives along the western American frontier), and my mother’s back to the 14th (Scandinavian peasants who never wandered far from their village), and I’m afraid there’s no evidence of any Jewish family. I’ve never hinted that I might be Jewish. People who know me have never made the assumption that I might be a cultural Jew.

The only people who call me Jewish are right-wingers who write to me to chew me out for some great liberal evil I’ve committed, and a surprising number of them do so. They never speculate that I’m Lithuanian, or tell me that my name sounds suspiciously Belgian, or sneer at my obvious Sinhalese bias — it’s always this bizarre insinuation that I’m a wicked anti-American liberal, therefore…Jew.

It says a lot about them. Not much about me. Why are so many teabaggers implicitly anti-semitic?

The guy’s an evolutionist, and there’s nothing in the whole course description about biblical creation as even a plausible alternative!

Oh, joy. We’re getting another cheesy Christian movie in which the college professor is the evil bad guy. We just had Kevin Sorbo pretending to be an angry atheist philosophy professor in God’s Not Dead, and now we get Harry Anderson playing an angry atheist biology professor in A Matter of Faith.

Rachel Whitaker, a Christian girl, heads off to college for her much-anticipated freshman year. New friends create situations that require important, quick decisions—some about her social life, some about her core beliefs! Rachel begins to embrace the ideas of the university’s immensely popular biology professor (Harry Anderson) who boldly teaches that Darwinian evolution is the only logical explanation for the origin of life, and the Bible therefore cannot be true. When Rachel’s father (Jay Pickett) senses something changing in his daughter while she is home on a weekend visit; he begins to look into the situation and what he discovers catches him completely off guard. Now very concerned about Rachel drifting away from her Christian faith and the clear teachings of the Bible, he accepts an impossible challenge and tries to do something about it!

Can you guess what the impossible challenge is? He’s going to debate the biology professor on evolution.

Gosh, I wonder who will win?

It’s rather clear that people who believe in the Bible don’t have much connection to reality in their entertainment.

We almost elected this mad woman to high office?

Sarah Palin is so stupid, it’s terrifying. Here she is preaching to her fellow lunatics about how liberals are soft on terrorists and are out to help our enemies, when we’re supposed to put the “fear of god” in them.

Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists. I think I’m going to be sick. This is why we should never ever vote Republican.

Isn’t public masturbation illegal?

A gun isn’t just a tool, it’s a sex aid for the terminally inadequate. A gun fondler in Georgia wandered about exposing his toy to children.

A Georgia man panicked parents and children at a local park and baseball field by randomly walking around and displaying his gun to anyone he encountered in the parking lot.

According to witnesses who spoke with WSB-TV, the man wandered around the Forsythe County park last Tuesday night showing his gun to strangers, telling them “there’s nothing you can do about it.”

He was right. There was nothing anyone could do about it. The police came, talked to him, he had a permit, so there was absolutely nothing illegal about strutting aimlessly through a park, smugly waving his gun at people.

Maybe there ought to be a law, though. And maybe the NRA should support it, being fans of responsible gun ownership and all that.

Ha ha, I made a funny.

But seriously, people like that will help make a change as more and more voters realized that these gun fanatics are dangerous idiots.

Just when I thought I was out, @BlakeStacey pulls me back in

I’ve been Salon-free for a whole week, and then Blake Stacey has to link to the newest tactic in Salon’s courting of the woo demographic. I’m used to the idiot apologists; I can mock the gooey soft religion of the liberal theists; but what they’d done this time is flaunt an incompetent atheist. Yes, it’s an article by an atheist, but it’s so badly written and so waffly and so reliant on stereotypes that I want to just back away slowly and pretend he’s not there.

The author is W.R. Klemm, a neuroscientist who, every time I’ve heard of him previously, has been terribly incoherent. What does this mean?

“Many polls show that most scientists are atheists,” said Dr. W.R. Klemm, a senior professor of neuroscience at the university’s College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, in explaining why he created the course. “I think that is unfortunate to say the least.”

I think it just means he’s a full-of-himself contrarian.

His article in Salon is far worse — for one thing, it meanders along forever, saying next to nothing. His premise seems to be that biologists and physicists are “two cultures” (and he cites C.P. Snow!) that don’t get along and don’t understand each other, because physicists are too mathy.

It’s hard for biologists to argue with physicists. Often physicists listen with detached bemusement because biologists can’t explain life with mathematics. Physics could not exist without math. Sometimes I think physicists get too enamored with math. I get the impression that they think that describing and predicting phenomena with equations is the same as explaining why and how such phenomena occur. Take the most famous equation of all, E = mc2. Just what does that equal sign mean? It implies that the variables on each side are the same. But is mass really identical to energy? True, mass can be converted to energy, as atom bombs prove, and energy can even be turned into mass. Still, they are not the same things. Not only are the units of measurement different, but the equation is only descriptive and predictive. It does not explain how mass converts to energy or vice versa.

I am embarrassed. Physicists, I swear, not all biologists are this stupid. Really, we aren’t.

Then, after telling us that he hates it when physicists write about biology, and muddily explaining that the mind has a material, biological basis, and sorta rejecting the silliness of The Spiritual Brain, he proceeds to explain to us that ‘spirit’ might be lurking in physics.

To me, other possibilities for discovering material attributes of “spirit” seem more likely. Modern physics, especially quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity, dark matter, and dark energy, has already shown that not even physicists understand what “material” is. I will now summarize the more likely possibilities for hidden realities of mind.

And then the neuroscientist writes about physics: quantum mechanics, relativity, dark matter, dark energy, string theory, parallel universes, etc., each with a little potted summary to explain how maybe there is a source for spirits within them. For example, bugger thermodynamics:

Also, what about the energy generated as electrons whip through protein chains in mitochondria? Only some of the energy is trapped in phosphate bonds of adenosine triphosphate. We assume that all the other energy is lost as heat. How can we be sure relativity is irrelevant to energy capture? Energy is well established as crucial for consciousness.

Oh, jebus. I am so eagerly anticipating the first creationist to come along and tell me that God is fueled by energy losses in biochemical pathways…because relativity. Or that dark energy is diddling our thoughts.

So what about dark energy? To push galaxies apart, it must impart some of its energy to the cluster of stars and planets to give them a push. What must dark energy be doing to us? Obviously, its push is not greater than the gravity that keeps us fixed to earth. But if that energy is absorbed by the galaxy, surely some of it must be absorbed in us. But what could such absorption do? Would such dark energy interact with the regular energy that we know about—like the energy in our brain? Could it act on consciousness?

Hey, and maybe the gravitational perturbations caused by the motion of the planets affects our brains, too, and astrology is true! Could it act on consciousness? is such a cheap and meaningless question — replace “it” with anything (frying pans, neutrinos, water, fluttering butterflies in the Amazon rain forest, the color orange, cosmic clouds of sentient formaldehyde, whatever) and it’s just as empty and just as thought-provoking as that noise.

I feel like I have to apologize to all the physicists in the world right now. Please, please, please don’t think all neuroscientists are like that. Neuroscience is a field that actually does use a lot of math and biochemistry and physical chemistry and physics, and it doesn’t usually lead to crania full of drivel.

The prophet who couldn’t shoot straight

Read about the real goings-on at the Bundy Ranch. Racism is just one of the lunacies on parade. GOOGLE DOCTORS THAT REMOVE MICROCHIPS. The summary:

Welfare negroes, the United Nations, sexually devious lawyers, satan, a Chinese solar farm, microchips, secret-agent NPS, a Muslim-Kenyan president, hippies, illegals. Take your pick.

Also revealing, and very Mormon: Bundy cast himself as a divinely inspired prophet of god who was delivering instructions to his people, instructing them in the prophecies they were supposed to follow, and chastising them for failing.

He goes on to explain that, although they managed to deter the BLM, they failed to do it “within one hour,” as the revelation had prophesied. So when an hour passes, he decides to get in his bulldozer and march on the BLM himself. The dozer gets stuck in the mud and he receives another revelation.

“It come to my mind real plain — the good Lord said, ‘Bundy, it’s not your job, it’s THEIR job.’ So we come back over here and heard that they had brought some cattle back. So I want you to understand,” addressing the crowd, “This is not my job, it’s YOUR job.

It’s a real comic opera. It’s too bad these kinds of clowns have successfully inserted themselves into American politics.

You can’t possibly be surprised

Cliven Bundy, the ignorant, ahistorical, far right wing, Mormon parasite who has been stealing the use of government land for decades, is also a flaming racist.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

I forgot to say he’s also egotistical. This two-bit peckerwood is giving a daily press conference in which he lets his mind ramble through the cobwebs in his skull, as if what he says is important. Could someone ask him about evolution, or climate change, or religion? Because I’m sure his ensuing monologue would be intensely entertaining.

A swarm of teabaggers on Twitter were complaining that the lamestream media just made up this story, and they weren’t going to believe it until there was video…which they said didn’t exist. Whoops.