I’m off the leash!

Good news for us atheists — we can now deny god publicly in the classroom!

Civil servants can seek to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views,” the Office of Personnel Management said in the memorandum to federal agencies, adding employees must ensure their efforts are “not harassing in nature.” OPM issued the guidance to restore constitutional freedoms and enable feds to practice their religious practices without fear of retaliation, the agency said.

“Federal employees should never have to choose between their faith and their career,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said. “This guidance ensures the federal workplace is not just compliant with the law but welcoming to Americans of all faiths.”

I know, if you’re a “glass half-empty” kind of person, you might think this is another step in the erosion of secularism and the separation of church and state, but I’m an optimistic “glass half-full” kind of guy. I’ve always been careful to not introduce my anti-religious sentiments in the classroom, or to make dismissive comments about gods to my colleagues, and when students tell me about their religious holidays, I make accommodations for them. But no more! I don’t have to conceal my fervent secular beliefs any more!

I get to be the kind of stereotypical atheist asshole portrayed in the God’s Not Dead movies. First day of class, the lecture is on why Jesus is stupid. First exam will have a question, “50 points: God exists, true or false” and the only answer I’ll accept is “false!” Religious students will be told they fail the class unless they can prove the existence of their god in a public debate in the classroom. Creationists in my evolution class? Not on my watch, they aren’t.

It’ll be such a relief to not have to throttle myself anymore.

I wonder if it will be a distraction from the scientific subject matter of my courses to bring up contentious issues like that? Nah. If probing the private, personal beliefs of their coworkers is considered a protected behavior in the federal government, why shouldn’t I poke deeply into these wacky ideas that some people at the university hold? It’s only fair.

Anyone want to take bets on whether the author(s) of that memorandum were atheists, or even considered the existence of atheist employees?

Happy day?

We had another storm blow through last night, and our basement is soaked. We might get some more thunderstorms today, but I think the worst is over.

But I think it’s going to be a good day because my role as the executor of my late mother’s estate is nearly done — all accounts and goods have been liquidated and turned into money in a bank account, and got the final distribution of that money to all of the heirs, so I’m about to sit down and do the final steps: accounting. It’s the final chore, so that’s good.

Today I just have to write a lot of checks — Mom had too many kids, and they had too many grandkids — double-checking sums and making sure everything is correctly put into a ledger. Then that stack of checks gets bundled up and mailed to our lawyer in the Pacific Northwest, who will then create a Declaration of Reasonable Diligence and the Declaration of Completion that will need my signature, and then he sends a statement to all of the heirs that I have done everything correctly, which the heirs must then formally approve, and then, finally, the lawyer will send them the money. Then I am done!

That’ll be a relief, getting that burden off my shoulders. Sadly, it feels a bit like my mother’s legacy has been turned into a few numbers that will be dispersed to her descendants, and will then fade away.

Time to turn into an accountant for a day. This is about the last thing I would ever choose to do.

My first recipe from a Neandertal cookbook

I’ve taught human physiology, so I already knew about the limits of protein consumption: if you rely too much on consuming lean protein, you reach a point where your body can’t cope with all the nitrogen. Here’s a good, succinct explanation of the phenomenon of “rabbit starvation.”

Fat, especially within-bone lipids, is a crucial resource for hunter-gatherers in most environments, becoming increasingly vital among foragers whose diet is based heavily on animal foods, whether seasonally or throughout the year. When subsisting largely on animal foods, a forager’s total daily protein intake is limited to not more than about 5 g/kg of body weight by the capacity of liver enzymes to deaminize the protein and excrete the excess nitrogen. For hunter-gatherers (including Neanderthals), with body weights typically falling between 50 and 80 kg, the upper dietary protein limit is about 300 g/day or just 1200 kcal, a food intake far short of a forager’s daily energy needs. The remaining calories must come from a nonprotein source, either fat or carbohydrate. Sustained protein intakes above ~300 g can lead to a debilitating, even lethal, condition known to early explorers as “rabbit starvation.” For mobile foragers, obtaining fat can become a life-sustaining necessity during periods when carbohydrates are scarce or unavailable, such as during the winter and spring.

I’d never thought about that, outside of an academic consideration, since a) I don’t live lifestyle that requires such an energy rich diet, and b) I’m a vegetarian, so I’m not going to sit down to consume over 1200 kcal of meat (I feel queasy even imagining such a feast). But when I stop to think about it, yeah, my hunter-gatherer ancestors must have been well aware of this limitation, which makes the “gatherer” part of the lifestyle even more important, and must have greatly affected their preferred choices from the kill.

There is very little fat in most ungulate muscle tissues, especially the “steaks” and “roasts” of the thighs and shoulders, regardless of season, or an animal’s age, sex, or reproductive state. Mid- and northern-latitude foragers commonly fed these meat cuts to their dogs or abandoned them at the kill. The most critical fat deposits are concentrated in the brain, tongue, brisket, and rib cage; in the adipose tissue; around the intestines and internal organs; in the marrow; and in the cancellous (spongy) tissue of the bones (i.e., bone grease). With the notable exception of the brain, tongue, and very likely the cancellous tissue of bones, the other fat deposits often become mobilized and depleted when an animal is undernourished, pregnant, nursing, or in rut.

So a steak is dog food; the favored cuts are ribs and brisket and organ meats. This article, though is mainly focused on bone grease and its production by Neandertal hunters. I didn’t even know what bone grease is until the article explained it to me. Oh boy, it’s my first Neandertal recipe!

Exploitation of fat-rich marrow from the hollow cavities of skeletal elements, especially the long bones, is fairly easy and well documented in the archaeological record of Neanderthals. On the basis of ethnohistoric accounts, as well as on experimental studies, the production of bone grease, an activity commonly carried out by women, requires considerable time, effort, and fuel. Bones, especially long-bone epiphyses (joints) and vertebrae, are broken into small fragments with a stone hammer and then boiled for several hours to extract the grease, which floats to the surface and is skimmed off upon cooling. For foragers heavily dependent on animal foods, bone grease provides a calorie-dense nonprotein food source that can play a critical role in staving off rabbit starvation.

Skimming off boiled fats does not sound at all appetizing…but then I thought of pho, which is made with a stock created by boiling bones for hours, or my grandmother’s stew, which had bones boiled in the mix, which you wouldn’t eat, but made an essential contribution to the flavor. Those we don’t cool to extract the congealed fats, but they were there. Then there’s pemmican, made by pounding nuts, grains, and berries in an animal fat matrix, which now sounds like the perfect food for someone hunting for game for long hours in the cold. It’s one of those things which seems superfluous when you’re living in a world filled with easy-to-reach calories, but it makes sense. I’m going to have to think about that when I’m prepping for the Trump-induced apocalypse.

Examples of hammerstone-induced impact damage on long bones from NN2/2B.
(A) B. primigenius, Tibia dex., impacts from posteromedial (no. 4892). (B) B. primigenius, Humerus sin., impacts from posteromedial (no. 4283). (C) B. primigenius, Tibia dex., impact from anterolateral (no. 8437). (D) Equus sp., Humerus sin., impacts from posterolateral (no. 21758).

The main point of the article, though, is that they’re finding evidence of cooperative behavior in Neandertals. It analyzes a site where Neandertals had set up a bone grease processing ‘factory’ where hunters brought in their prey to be cut up, the bones broken apart, and then everything was boiled for hours along a lakeside. The place was strewn with shattered bone fragments! They also found bits of charcoal, vestiges of ancient fires. There was no evidence of anything like pottery, but they speculate that “experiments recently demonstrated that organic perishable containers, e.g., made out of deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food”.

Not only do I have a recipe, I have a description of the technology used to produce the food. Anyone want to get together and make Bone Grease ala Neandertal? I’ll have to beg off on actually tasting it — vegetarian, you know — so y’all can eat it for yourselves.

It’s derecho time

A derecho is a widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms known as a mesoscale convective system. Derechos cause hurricane-force winds, heavy rains, and flash floods. In many cases, convection-induced winds take on a bow echo form of squall line, often forming beneath an area of diverging upper tropospheric winds, and in a region of both rich low-level moisture and warm-air advection.

We were hit hard last night — our windows were rattling and banging with hail and savage rain smashing into our house, our basement was flooded, and the cat was stricken with mortal terror and freaking out in the house. We lost power briefly, and I notice some of the milkweed Mary is cultivating was smashed. No serious damage was done, fortunately.

Except…it’s predicted that we’ll probably get another one tonight.

Israel is not a lawful state

Growing up, did any of you hear some variation of the line, “You have to eat all your [broccoli][peas][lutefisk], there are children starving in [China][India][Africa]!” We were supposed to be grateful for the plenty that we are lucky to have, and feel pity for all the blameless children who weren’t so fortunate. In my case, it didn’t work particularly well (I was well aware that that pile of soggy broccoli on my plate wasn’t going to be scooped up and sent to China), but I did learn to feel guilt that we weren’t sharing with those in need.

Not everyone learned to feel that guilt, I guess. Some seem to think it’s fine to starve children.

Evidence gathered by Amnesty International demonstrates how over a month since the introduction of its militarized aid distribution system, Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide.

Heartbreaking testimonies gathered from medical staff, parents of children hospitalized for malnutrition and displaced Palestinians struggling to survive paint a horrifying picture of acute levels of starvation and desperation in Gaza. Their accounts provide further evidence of the catastrophic suffering caused by Israel’s ongoing restrictions on life-saving aid and its deadly militarized aid scheme coupled with mass forced displacement, relentless bombardment and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.

Even worse, the food aid stations are set up as bait, drawing out parents of starving children to be gunned down by Israeli snipers.

Gaza’s Health Ministry reports that as of July 24, Israeli forces have killed 59,587 people and injured 143,498, including 8,363 deaths since a surge in Israeli strikes began in March 2025.

Since May, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to access food, most near aid distribution sites run by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. The GHF has rejected the U.N.’s figures as “false and exaggerated.”

UNICEF estimates that 17,000 children are among those killed since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, with another 33,000 injured. Speaking at a U.N. Security Council meeting on July 16, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said the toll is like “a whole classroom of children killed every day for nearly two years.”

Meanwhile, Israel, with the assistance of the US, is intentionally starving children.

A third of Palestinians in Gaza are going without food for days at a time, Smith said. He said about 100,000 women and children were suffering severe acute malnutrition in the territory.

OCHA, the U.N. humanitarian affairs office, reports that malnutrition has risen among children under age 5 in Gaza. Of more than 56,000 who’ve been screened, 9% were assessed as being “acute malnourished” in the first two weeks of July, up from 6% last month and 2.4% in February. In Gaza City, 16% of 15,000 children were found to suffer from acute malnutrition, quadruple the percentage from February.

Even before the war, an estimated 97% of Gaza’s drinking water was contaminated by the sea, sewage and farm runoff and was therefore considered unsafe. Since October 2023, Israeli airstrikes against critical infrastructure such as wells, desalination units, sewage pumps, tanks and pipelines have caused the system to collapse, according to Human Rights Watch.

I no longer support the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. Dismantle that horrible government and turn the entire country over to Palestinians, with independent UN monitoring to prevent retaliation. Although, to be honest, I think some retaliation is necessary for justice to prevail — Netanyahu, for instance, ought to spend the rest of his disgusting life in prison.

Additionally, it’s committing genocide. I don’t care to hear from people who are splitting hairs to deny that Israel is a genocidal monster of a state.

Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it.

In reports published on Monday, the two groups said Israel had targeted civilians in Gaza only because of their identity as Palestinians over nearly two years of war, causing severe and in some cases irreparable damage to Palestinian society.

A number of international and Palestinian groups have already described the war as genocidal, but reports from two of Israel-Palestine’s most respected human rights organisations, who have for decades documented systemic abuses, is likely to add to pressure for action.

I missed the TCCSA debate until now. Nothing was lost.

A while back, I mentioned that the Twin Cities Creation Science Association was doing an online creation/evolution debate on the 26th and that maybe I’d tune in and see what they had to say. I didn’t. I knew the creationist, Brian Lauer, would natter on about the kinds of arguments Kent Hovind makes, and that he’d misrepresent the science, and that he’d do nothing but trot out oft-refuted nonsense, and I decided to wait until today, when I could play it back at a faster speed and skip over the stupid bits, of which there were many.

Lauer turned out to be worse than I thought. He’s an acolyte of Walt Brown’s hydroplate theory, the idea the “fountains of the deep” blasted massive amounts of material during the flood that shot out into space, so when scientists find amino acids in meteorites, that’s because they all originated on Earth, and were subsequently launched skyward during the flood catastrophe. There isn’t a single crackpot explanation some fringe doofus could mention that Lauer wouldn’t bring out in the debate…and then he’d cherry-pick headlines from scientific sources to show that science was in the Bible.

Mark Reid, his opponent, was batting these claims down as fast as Lauer would make them, but nothing was penetrating the creationist’s smug smirk. I was falling asleep when, surprisingly, my name was brought up, at about the 1:36:00 minute.

Oh boy! This was Bob Enyart’s Trochlear Challenge, where he demanded that I explain the evolutionary origin of a specific ocular muscle. Lauer brought it up so he could crow about the fact that I said “I don’t know”.

OK, but Enyart has challenged me to explain how this feature evolved. I have an answer. It’s easy.

I don’t know.

I don’t see any obvious obstacle to an arrangement of muscles evolving, but I don’t know the details of this particular set. And there’s actually a very good reason for that.

This is a case where you have to step back from the creationist and look at the big picture. Don’t get bogged down in the details. Take a look at the whole context of the question.

We don’t know exactly how this evolved because all living vertebrates, with the exception of the lamprey, have the same arrangement of extra-ocular muscles. This is a primitive and very highly conserved condition, with no extant intermediates. We’ve seen the arrangement of these muscles in 400 million year old placoderm fossils, and they’re the same; these muscles probably evolved 450 million or more years ago, and we have no record of any intermediate state. So I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.

But that’s where we have to look at the big picture: Bob Enyart, a raving loon and young earth creationist who thinks the whole planet is less than 10,000 years old, is asking me to recount the details of an event that occurred almost half a billion years ago. I should think it’s enough to shatter his position and show that he’s wrong to simply note that however it evolved, it happened in animals 75,000 times older than he claims the planet is. Has he even noticed this little problem with his question?

How nice of Lauer to remember part of what I said. But as was typical of all of his arguments, he only mentioned part of the answer, the part he could twist to fit his beliefs, and not the whole of the answer, which shot down the greater YEC thesis.

I haven’t encountered Lauer until now, and he’s based in St Cloud, where my son lives. He’s one of the many shames of Minnesota.

True superheroes can resist the malign influence of plague rats

If alien invaders wanted to take over Earth, the most efficient strategy wouldn’t be to bomb things, or zap them with lasers; it would be to sow the planet with custom viruses that wipe out those pesky humans. To be really effective, they might want to indoctrinate the people psychologically to avoid basic prophylactic measures (this has already become a conspiracy theory). SMBC plays out this notion to its logical conclusion, and postulates that the triumphant survivors of this alien assault would be kindergarten teachers.

I support this conclusion. I think we ought to give all kindergarten and preschool teachers a massive raise, or at least issue biohazard gear to them.

Everything he touches turns to crap

Elon Musk has been keeping a lower profile lately, as the bad news is catching up to all of his businesses. Exploiters gotta exploit, though, so he has been able to open a new business in a domain he knows nothing about: fast food. His Hollywood restaurant is called the Tesla Diner.

It opened on Monday at 4:20pm, and you can tell that that was Elon’s idea. It features a bank of Tesla chargers, and if you order your food from your Tesla, you get priority on your service. I guess you better buy a Tesla so you can get slightly faster delivery of an overpriced burger. I don’t think this will rescue Tesla.

As for the food…

Jake Hook, who runs a Los Angeles-focused “Diner Theory” social media account, had described the Tesla Diner menu to me as “all over the place”, with a combination of “very fast food shlocky” items combined with sandwiches made with “bread from Tartine”, the luxury California bakery. The diner also offers a mix of “own the libs” and “we are the libs” options: on the one hand, “Epic Bacon”, four strips of bacon are served with sauces as a meatfluencer alternative to french fries, and on the other, avocado toast and matcha lattes. There was a kale salad served in a cardboard Cybertruck: welcome to southern California.

I’ll pass. The quick summary is this:

But the billionaire CEO tends to make big promises and not quite fulfill them. That appeared to be true even for a tiny burger joint.

It’s what he does.