Republicans win another one

So Ossoff was defeated by Handel in Georgia’s 6th congressional district. Are you getting tired of this? I’m getting tired of this.

Karen Handel is simply a terrible human being, and she wasn’t shy about broadcasting it. She’s a smug conservative Christian who hates gay and trans people, demonstrating once again that the Republicans have a solid base among the bigots. Not only does it not damage her electability among Republicans, but expect the media to tut-tut afterwards about calling the terrible human beings who voted for a terrible human being terrible human beings. And hey, it seems appealing to bigotry is a great way to get out the vote.

The Democrats, as usual, followed their standard strategy: find an upper middle class centrist, typically a white man in a nice suit, and give them lots of money and demand that they follow a cautious, inoffensive, and ultimately uninspiring path. Triangulate tactically to put up the Least Worst Candidate. That simply doesn’t work when you’re dealing with the Bold Candidate from Hell. Shouldn’t we have learned our lesson from Trump?

How about if instead we drew on our base? More black grandmothers who are fed up at seeing their sons shot or thrown into prison. More middle class labor workers who are smart enough to see through the lies of management. Remember the Carrier air conditioning deal? Trump knew that whatever happened would be to the advantage of the people who owned the company, not the workers, and he just lied. If you’re going to promote a white man in a suit, at least make sure it’s one who is willing to align himself with the interests of the working class and the poor, and is willing to say things that antagonize rich donors but might get people to actually turn out and vote.

Oh, well. The bright side of the story is that once again the Republicans have confirmed their solid commitment to evil, with yet another Republican representative who ought to make any decent, humane person sick.

I guess that’s the bright side.

It’s not very reassuring.

FIRE THAT COP.

Jesus fucking christ. Police dashcam video of the Philando Castile murder has been released, and I made the mistake of watching it. The car is pulled over, the cop explains that he was pulled over for a broken break light, he asks for license and registration, the driver calmly tells him that he carries a gun, and then the cop freaks out and starts yelling and unloads his handgun into the car. Seven shots! It’s horrific.

Later, the murderer is telling his fellow gunmen that Castile had been acting “hinky” and was looking directly into his eyes (truly a criminal act). The only one “hinky” here is the cop, who panics at a traffic stop and slaughters a citizen.

Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted, unbelievably. I hope he’s not working in any position that requires that he be armed anymore — he is a coward unsuited to any stressful situation — and I look forward to the civil suit that should strip him of everything he owns.

Read the statement given by the murder-cop after he killed that man. Would you believe that he was afraid for the little girl in the car, and that he had reason to think Castile might be a stone-cold killer because he was exposing that poor girl to second-hand smoke?

He got off because of that callous kind of lie.

Conversation with an ex-creationist

I’ve never been a believer, so who am I to say how to convince others to leave their faith? Tonight at 7pm Central, I’ll have a conversation with Glenn D., a former true believer who even donated money to Answers in Genesis, but has now seen the Light. Let’s find out what it took.

If you have questions you’d like me to ask, feel free to leave them here; he’s also commented here before so maybe he’ll answer you directly.

More like “wary coexistence”

Annalee Newitz writes about the domestication history of house cats. They’re odd in that they haven’t been bred away from the standard wildcat, so the idea is that they’ve only recently been domesticated, and haven’t yet undergone extensive genetic selection. Interesting, but I must disagree with her closing statement.

Or maybe cats will continue to defy domestication. They could carve out a place as one of the only animals to befriend humans without ever falling completely under our control.

“Befriend”? She hasn’t met my cat.

The Face of Evil

Who are these people?

Fox News recently added another “news” program to their lineup, The Specialists. I’ve never watched it. It’s hosted by the cloddish one from Fox & Friends, Eric Bolling, and two young women I’ve never heard of before, Katherine Timpf and Eboni Williams. None of them have any significant expertise; Bolling is an ex-baseball player, Timpf is a comedian, and Williams is the best qualified of the bunch, with a law degree, and that’s it. This is just a group of opinionated people with opinions, and they get their very own news show on Fox — I think you could probably get a better group of people by going down to a local bar and hiring whatever table is having the loudest argument.

But here’s the real problem: these bozos are chattering about what to do about North Korea, and Bolling has ideas.

Bolling suggested that any threat of military action on the Korean peninsula will prompt China to take action for fear that millions of refugees will cripple the Chinese economy.

No one else is going to help them out, Bolling offered, adding the incentive will be even greater if South Korea builds a freaking wall so all North Korean refugees are forced to flee to China.

Build a wall? Why is that a solution Trumpkins always suggest? As you probably know, there is already the Korean Demilitarized Zone in place, a 250km guarded barrier 4km wide stretching across the entire Korean peninsula, backed by military forces on both sides. Travel between the two countries is already tightly controlled.

But think about this plan: he wants to terrorize the civilian population of North Korea into becoming a weapon used against China. Already awful, you might say, but how does he plan to freak out North Korean civilians?

The Fox News host later said the United States should consider an attack on the DPRK.

Thirty minutes is the lead time between firing that missile in North Korea and Los Angeles, Bolling said. Are you willing to risk Los Angeles?

It may be time for a preemptive strike, he added.

I forgot the other thing Trumpkins suggest: bombs. Walls and bombs. That’s how we’ll solve all of our problems.

I would ask Bolling “are you willing to risk Seoul?”, if I didn’t already suspect he’d cheerfully say “yes!” 25 million people live in the Seoul metropolitan area, and stacked up on the other side of the DMZ is the DPRK artillery, all within range and pointed directly at the city. Where are those refugees going to scurry? How can he be so cavalier about triggering destruction and death and misery to innocents?

And what are we going to do about a news organization that willfully sows dangerous misinformation? Point and laugh, I guess, and let everyone know that they’re a deluded idiot if you watch Fox News.

Like our president.

I have irked Ken Ham

I had no idea. Every few days to a week, Answers in Genesis puts out a youtube video called “Answers News”. It’s terrible. I watched all of this one.

They go through news stories and moan and groan about those dang secularists. There was a polyamorous marriage in Colombia — slippery slope! Gay marriage will lead to pedophilia. Rights are a Christian invention, you can’t talk about rights without accepting their version of Christianity. Canada just legislated gender theory into law — Georgia Purdom can be imprisoned if she doesn’t accept someone’s preferred pronouns, because it’s against her religion. There were brief snipes at various science papers, largely consisting of laughing at the idea that a fossil can be 50,000 years old, or 99 million years old.

One thing I learned, because I’d never listened to him before, is that Bodie Hodge is pretty damned thick. He kept interjecting explanations into the discussion: did you know that polyamorous is from a word meaning “many” and a French word for love? You gotta understand what the word “liberal” means: liberal means you’re taking liberties with things. It was nonstop dumbsplaining.

But mainly I listened because they spent about 5 minutes at the beginning talking about me. An atheist visited the Ark Park, shock horror, and he mocked everything. Ken has all my tweets printed out, and he was disgusted. How dare I say there wasn’t much information in the big wooden box? That seems to be what miffed them most. From the timing of my tweets, he calculated that I only spent an hour and 15 minutes in there, so I must have been racing through everything — why, when he personally takes groups through and explains everything, it takes about 2 hours to do the tour.

It sure felt like it was a lot longer than that — there was a lot of time spent slowly wending through ridiculously prolonged tours of empty boxes. But sure, I’ll believe it was objectively an hour and a quarter. I didn’t have to run to do that time though. It was more like a slow stroll, stopping at each room and display, and taking pictures. So once again, Ken Ham confirms my impression of the paucity of material in there.

He complains that I said the parking lot was ten times larger than it needed to be — it’s only twice as large, he said. No, that’s not true. I got there late in the morning, and got a parking spot right near the shuttle bus pick up, and sure drove a long way through empty spaces to get there.

About the weathered look of the outside of the ark — he says they intended it that way. OK. I guess grey is an attractive color.

Then Ken went searching through my blog for ways to psychoanalyze me. All atheists hate god, you know, and that can be traced back to some traumatic event that made them angry at god, so he singles out this post, Odious Christianity, in which I say that my father and my sister have died. A-ha! That must have made me hate god! But he completely misses the point of the post: it was that everyone suffers pain and loss in their life, but it takes a a Christian to turn that around and blame the victim. This is what enraged me: not god, not my grief, but that Ken Ham blames that pain on “sin”.

News items sometimes cite the major causes of death in humans as various diseases are discussed–but ultimately there’s only one cause–sin!

Yeah, everyone who has ever died, who has ever been in pain, deserved it. But don’t worry! All you have to do is believe in his hateful cult and you might die horribly for your sins, but you’ll be forgiven in your afterlife.

By the way, one problem with Ham’s diagnosis of my trauma is that I never believed in god, and became a self-aware atheist in my teens, long before those losses I mentioned.

Oh, well. One other thing I’ve now discovered is that there is actually a news panel show that is more stupid than Fox and Friends.

Raychelle Burks explains how chemists would get rid of a body

I always thought the idea of getting rid of a body by dumping it in an acid bath was impractical and inefficient — it would take such a long time to break down, and would require so much in the way of chemicals. Raychelle Burks does the test, dropping chunks of pork in beakers of hydrochloric acid or sodium hydroxide, and my suspicions were confirmed. This is a bad way to do it. It’s also really gross.

You really need to get a biologist’s expertise for this job. My first thought was dermestid beetles — clean it down to bare bones, then mount the skeleton and store it in plain sight in the anatomy lab. You don’t have any beetles? There’s always Lord Dunsany’s solution.

But for simple practicality, just find a crematorium.

Make your monsters unique: Lizzie Borden vs. Lovecraftian horrors

I watched the season finale of American Gods, and they did something brave: they portrayed Jesus as just another member of the motley horde of gods. Usually the Christian faith is excluded from these kinds of god-stories — you can’t reduce the One True God to another myth, like Anansi or Czernobog! — but the show did just that. Furthermore, they featured dozens of Jesii, because there so many different versions of him, all different and often incompatible with one another. They chickened out a little bit, though; there was a throw-away line about Jesus being the nicest of the gods, and they failed to include one prominent American god, Supply-Side Jesus of the Prosperity Gospel, armed with an AK-47 while crushing the necks of the undeserving poor under his sandals.

But it’s still an interesting point. If you’re going to personify deities, which rendition are you going to use? There are at least hundreds of gods in the Bible alone, although the devout seem to think giving one name to all of those entities, malignant and benign, is enough to unify them. Likewise that got me thinking of other mythical beings. Is there one true vampire nature, for instance? The media versions are all over the map. There’s the Stoker version, which wed Victorian disgust for sex with disgust for contagion. There’s the Ann Rice version, all sex and Catholic guilt. There’s the del Toro/Hogan version, which got rid of the sex and wallowed in repulsive infection stories. Or the Stephen King version, which is a little less gorey but is still all about dread of infection and decay and death. I shall not dwell on the sparkley angsty emo vampires, but they’re also part of the range.

One of the problems with the proliferation of supernatural variants, though, is that interest attenuates. Which Jesus are we talking about? Which vampire? I’d also add, which zombie? Pretty soon these kinds of stock genre boogey men degenerate into an unimaginative gluing together of standard tropes and the mechanics begin to show. Oh, this is a standard Stoker vampire plus tolerance for sunlight plus a functioning penis. Oh, this is a God-is-Love Jesus plus non-white xenophobia minus pacifism. It’s paint-by-numbers supernaturalism. Genre fiction (note: I include Christianity in the genre fiction category) tends to get overwhelmed with this kind of rote assembly line crap. A few original and creative stories launch an idea into popularity, and then the hacks take over. The zombie genre is in the terminal stages of the process right now. Seriously, authors, don’t bother doing zombie anything anymore, unless it’s genuinely original, and no, “fast zombies whose weak spot is the heart rather than the brain” are not original.

I love the creepy-crawly kind of horror story, the ones that make you go “eww, ick” now and then and wonder which character is going to die horribly next. But I’m tired of vampires and zombies and Christian evangelists — those monsters have been sucked dry and reduced to gristle and slime and all the thrill is gone. I am overjoyed when I stumble across a story that is new and different.

Which brings me to the point of this overlong introduction. My airplane reading this past weekend! I found something cool and fun and creepy!

I’m a fan of Lovecraftian atmosphere — but not so much of most of the stories themselves. Usually there is just some detached narrator recounting the mounting horror growing in the breasts of the victims, who will meet their demise in some climax of hyperbolic madness. There are lots of Lovecraftian pastiches out there that are little more than collections of increasingly florid adjectives and adverbs. But have you noticed that most Lovecraftian heroes are dull men with little imagination who are usually shattered by some unearthly revelation? Fine, once or twice. Boring when every Lovecraft imitator does exactly the same thing.

But Cherie Priest doesn’t. Her novel, Maplecroft: The Borden Dispatches, first focuses on the characters, but it’s still Lovecraftian. It’s set in Massachusetts in the 1890s; Miskatonic University has a featured role; there are horrors that emerge from the sea. The story revolves around the Borden sisters — that’s right, Lizzie Borden, after her acquittal from a famous pair of axe murders, and yes, her axe, and her skill with it, is very important in the story. We learn the true secret reason why her parents were killed. There is a blend of science — Lizzie has a basement lab where she tries to understand what is happening, and one aspect of the nightmare overtaking them is an unusual specimen of Physalus — and mysticism. There is a supernatural aspect to the weird absorption of the townspeople in a voice from the sea, and the fate of the individuals who touch the thing from the ocean. There’s definitely horror here: the monsters are vivid and disgusting, and portrayed with the Lovecraft Adjective Generator turned down enough to endow them with a revolting degree of plausibility. Lizzie has her axe, and also a convenient installation in her basement called “the cooker” which allows her to render monstrosities down to digested slime. It’s all very well thought out and grisly.

Most importantly, though, you know enough about the characters that you actually care about them as they are driven towards terror and the inevitable descent into madness.

Recommended, if you’re a fan of horror and Lovecraft and good writing. I’ve also read her book Boneshaker, which has got zombies in it, which are usually a turn-off for me, but it hasn’t got very many zombies in it, and they’re kind of a generic mass threat on the side, so you can mostly ignore them and read it for the story and characters.