Gun control NOW

There’s been another mass shooting, at a night club in Florida, with about 20 dead so far. There is something rotten in the USA, and part of it has to be this culture that regards owning an assault rifle as a right, and the use of that weapon as an expression of masculine power.

It needs to stop.

The only problem is that trying to take their guns away sets the gun-fondlers to squealing as if they’re threatened with castration, and the glinty-eyed madmen at the NRA get more money thrown at them to buy up congress. Maybe what we also need is huge reforms in campaign finance so that our representatives would listen more to the people who are moaning in fear in the electorate, than to the smug parasites with bags of money.

Because you know already that no government, state or federal, is going to change a damn thing now.

More information is trickling out. The death toll is up to 50, and the shooter is named Omar Mateen. The story is that he was infuriated to have seen two men kissing.

Now the take-away from all that should be that a) assault rifles in the hands of a single madman can cause horrific casualties, and b) this was a hate crime against the gay community. Unfortunately, I predict that all that will reverberate through the media is that he had an Islamic name, therefore we’ve got to do something about the Muslims.

The narrative has been set. The headline on CNN right now is “GUNMAN WAS PRO-ISIS”.

Jake Tapper wants you to be sure to know that this was caused by radical Islam.

“There are a lot of members of that community and supporting friends and family who are very worried,” Tapper explained. “Obviously if this was radical Islam, which the special agent in charge of the FBI suggested it may have been, that is a community that has been under siege from radical Islam.”

Do they even know that this hatred of LGBTQ people is a property held in common by radical Islam and radical Christianity? Except of course that radical Islam is thankfully marginalized in the US, while radical Christianity is happily legislating against queers from a position of power.

Governor Rick Scott doesn’t want to say openly that this was an attack on the gay community, and thinks the proper response is to “pray”.

Fuck “thoughts and prayers”.

She’s persistent, I give her that

Today has been blog maintenance day. I’ve been tidying up some things behind the scenes here at FtB, and I’m also almost done with a chore over on ScienceBlogs. Some of you who’ve been around for a while know that 5 years ago, National Geographic took over the management of Sb (it’s one of the things that prompted Ed Brayton and I to move out, since they were going to have some new policies), and one of the first things they did was update the blogs there to WordPress.

In my case, they botched it. My site was so huge and full of comments that their scripts weren’t able to cope, and while they got my posts updated, mostly, they butchered the comments: an unknown number of comments were outright lost (I estimate somewhere around half a million to a million; don’t be surprised, we’re approaching a million comments on FtB Pharyngula soon), and another 750,000 were erroneously flagged as spam, and hidden away in the spam queue. Easy to handle, right? Just approve all those mistakenly filtered comments, and voila! Done!

Except…I don’t have direct access to the database, so I can’t just charge in and approve all those records through MySQL. No, I have to do it through the WordPress interface, which is limited to doing 250 comments at a time. It’s 3 clicks of the mouse to approve 250 comments, but 750,000 comments? You do the math. So what I do is once or twice a week, I sit down and plod through a thousand or two comments. When I feel like it. It’s really boring, so there are long lapses where I just let it go. But today, I got it down to just 20,000 comments held up, so I was going to power through and get ’em all done at last.

But…boring. Easily distracted.

So anyway, while doing all of that stuff, I ran across this old post of mine that made me chuckle. I’m writing about this woman who has been stalking me for decades. Decades, I tell you! Since 1957! It’s amazing how much similarity there has been in our lives. And then I realized that post was written ten years ago…and she’s still here.

Shhh. She’s in the next room. Don’t make a noise or she might notice. My knee is acting up, or I’d try to sneak out and make a run for it. Maybe you can get away for me and come back with help.

She just went into the kitchen. There are knives there. I’m so afraid.

Why are atheist conversion stories by Christians so damned unconvincing?

There most certainly are people who made sincere conversions from a state of godlessness to one of devout certainty. This is actually a very interesting process, and I’d like to know more about it, because I can’t imagine myself ever becoming a god-believer. I want to understand what makes for a persuasive argument for patent nonsense.

One example is Holly Ordway, an atheist professor of literature who became a Catholic. She’s got a whole memoir on the subject, which I haven’t read because all the summaries make it sound awful and unbelievable.

For example, Ordway describes her state of atheism:

Dr. Holly Ordway has published a book titled Not God’s Type, telling her personal story. She begins “I had never in my life said a prayer, never been to a church service. Christmas meant presents and Easter meant chocolate bunnies–nothing more.” But her views get hardened: “In college, I absorbed the idea that Christianity was historical curiosity, or a blemish on modern civilization, or perhaps both. My college science classes presented Christians as illiterate anti-intellectuals who, because they didn’t embrace Darwinism, threatened the advancement of knowledge. My history classes omitted or downplayed references to historical figures’ faith.” Still later, “At thirty-one years old, I was an atheist college professor–and I delighted in thinking of myself that way. I got a kick out of being an unbeliever; it was fun to consider myself superior to the unenlightened, superstitious masses, and to make snide comments about Christians.”

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Big boat go boom

stupidarkcliche

Think for a moment about the creationist’s own views of Noah’s Ark and the Flood. This was a cataclysmic event: Over a month of intense rainfall, gigantic fountains of water erupting from the deep, and in some pseudoscientific versions, a canopy of metallic hydrogen surrounding the earth exploded in an interaction with the almost pure oxygen of Earth’s atmosphere, converting 80% of that oxygen into water that deluged the planet. At the Creation “Museum”, Ken Ham imagines a wall of water hundreds of feet high crashing into the land in a kind of super-tsunami that swept all the way into the center of the continents. The Genesis Flood imagines that most major geological features were generated in this relatively brief event — the Himalayas were thrown up, the Grand Canyon gouged out. Forests were shredded, and the oceans were clotted with debris. Ham argues that there were huge floating rafts of logs and dirt adrift on the seas immediately afterwards, that were used by the survivors — those few organisms on the Ark — to drift to all the newly formed continents afterwards.

Oh, yeah, the Ark. Big wooden barge. It survived all of that chaos.

One has to wonder, then, why Ken Ham couldn’t have used 4,000 year old building techniques to assemble an indestructible floating wooden frame in his Ark Park, or how come the Dutch model of the Ark crumpled when it bumped into a boat in Oslo?

arkbroke

That’s the thing about creationists: they want to imagine that their all-powerful god wields immense cosmic forces and emphasize the dramatic, catastrophic power of their world-killing flood, but at the same time they can’t even comprehend the energies involved in an ocean swell.

We even have video of the collision! It’s a slow-motion bump.

The whole dang family is this clueless!

Brock Turner raped an unconscious woman. His dad called it a “20 minute action” and seemed to think losing his appetite for steak was punishment enough. Have you been wondering what his mom had to say? The court documents have been released, and now we can read what his heartbroken mother wrote to defend him.

Those happy family times are gone forever, replaced by despair, fear, depression, anxiety, doubt, and dread. I don’t think I have been able to take a deep breath since this happened. My first thought upon wakening every morning is “this isn’t real, this can’t be real. Why him? Why HIM? WHY? WHY?” I have cried every single day since Jan. 18. This is on my mind every moment.

Why HIM?, as if this was something horrible that just happened to her happy innocent son? He’s a rapist. He raped someone. This wasn’t something that happened to him, it was something he did. He is the subject of the sentence “He raped her”, not the object.

I am sure this event has made her family miserable, but let’s not get confused about who is responsible.

Funsies

I just thought I’d mention that Convergence is coming up — I’ll be there the whole weekend and will be having a grand time. We usually go with the whole family, but this year we’re scattered and we’re just coming off an expensive reunion/wedding in Korea, so it’ll just be me and my son Alaric.

I’ve also just now learned that there will be another NerdCon in October. I went to the one last fall, and it was excellent — a very writerly sort of event, all about getting those creative juices bubbling. I’ll probably go to that, too.

If you see me, say hello! I’m always happy to meet you all.

As long as I’m planning ahead, how could I forget to mention Skepticon in November?

My hometown does good

Kent-Syrian-Refugees

I grew up in Kent, Washington, and I just learned that Kent is one of a small number of cities chosen to settle Syrian refugees.

Among a divided community, Twenty five, ten-member families will resettle in Kent in the coming weeks.

“Kent has affordable housing, ample job opportunities, and a welcoming community,” said Dave Duea, director of refugee and immigration services for the Seattle-based Lutheran Community Services of Washington. “We expect to resettle many more families in Kent, along with many other refugee groups we are proud to serve.”

Well, I hope it’s welcoming. On the forum where I heard about this, people were talking about “savages” and declaring that “the jungle just opened up”. I see it as good news, though. Not only are they praising the town, but it’s a reflection of a vast improvement since I lived there. I remember Kent as a barren wasteland of banks and gas stations, with farms being steadily paved over and replaced with warehouses. When I’ve been back to visit, it is much improved (although traffic is much worse), with an entertainment complex, an expanded library, and a light rail station. When I left, I thought I’d never be back. Now it looks like a lovely place to retire to (except for the traffic).

Having some more ethnic diversity is just another big plus.

It is too bad, though, that a religious organization is front and center in assisting in this humanitarian effort. If only secular organizations were larger and more involved…

NEVER MIND. Snopes has the source for this one, the “Nevada Scooper”, as a fake news site. I hadn’t checked because it was such a mundane and unsurprising story, and didn’t seem particularly like clickbait — it was just something happening in my hometown. But apparently, “settling refugees in America” is one of those subjects that draws in outraged readers.

Friday Cephalopod: Force of arms

octopusarmimage

Who among you has taught or studied vertebrate anatomy? I have. It’s cool. Skeletal and muscular anatomy are weird, though, because we so take the principles for granted that we’re often not aware of it. We can move because we have a jointed framework, a collection of levers that are moved by the contractions of muscle fibers, which have distinctive attachments and insertions via tendons on those bones (or, in some cases, the muscles attach to sheets of connective tissue called fascia). The musculoskeletal part of anatomy classes consists of a lot of memorization of muscles, their origins and insertions, and the effect of the action of contracting the muscle. In some ways, vertebrate limbs are actually rather crude, made up of bony rods with joints that are prone to failure (I am very aware of that as I get older), with a collection of long muscles cobbled together to carry out specific movements.

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Predictability

Donald Trump has reacted to Elizabeth Warren’s speech. How, you might wonder? Guess.

If your bet was placed on “demeaning nickname, ethnic slur, and fact-free insult”, you’re a winner! Unfortunately, everyone bet that way, so this was basically an even odds gamble, and you just get your money back.

I was tempted to put a nickel on “substantive, intellectual response” because the odds on that meant I’d be a millionaire now, but decided it would just be throwing away five cents.

Warren replies.