Derek K. Miller is dead

Another atheist exits with grace and dignity.

Here it is. I’m dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote–the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.

If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.

Please, could you all stop dying and let me get to know you while you’re alive? I know, that’s a terribly selfish sentiment, but I browsed through Miller’s archives and he was a good and decent person…and his death just reminds me that there a multitude of good and decent people still here, still all around me, and I don’t know them all.

The puny ones resist

The gentleman squid gazes at you with an appraising eye. Do you have what it takes to stand up for the right and the truth and a civilized way of life, or do you side with the barbarian rabble?

i-080cb04eafc5345f23094113d8fab685-gentleman_squid.jpeg

Sadly, I must report that Greta Christina, Hemant Mehta, Jen McCreight, and JT Eberhard have recruited another conspirator, Adam Lee, to their goal of defeating me as we strive to raise money for Camp Quest. They have narrowed the gap to approximately $1100 now and…

Wait, no, that’s ridiculous. They are so far behind and their vain struggling so comical that I have no fear at all that they will catch up. At this point, it’s simply a cruel, vicious game of piling up such an insurmountable lead that their spirits will be pulverized. Which is, of course, what we atheists do. Join me. Donate. Destroy the weak.

Unrepentant vandalism in BC

Tomorrow, I’ll be in Kamloops, British Columbia. The godless have been rampaging across that province, what with this evil conference where atheists will be actually encouraged to speak, and a bus campaign in Kelowna and Kamloops and Victoria, where innocent eyes will be assaulted with vile atheist propaganda, with slogans like “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. Then, of course, I’ll be descending from the skies like a wrathful angel, striding across the landscape with my eyes afire, crushing the pious with my righteous fury, while occasionally being mistaken for a cuddly waddling teddy bear, which will piss me off even more.

The faithful are not sitting back and allowing themselves to be brutalized by our ghastly, horrible, vicious invasion. The transit company has been fighting hard to prevent wicked atheists from giving them money — they had to be taken to court to force them to not discriminate, and even then, they stood prepared to drop the ads as soon as someone squeaked.

Trottier said he took exception to statements by BC Transit spokeswoman Joanna Lingsangan that if ads in the Okanagan are vandalized or result in harassment against bus drivers, they will be removed.

“She’s basically gone and told any fanatic what they can do to bully the government into taking our ads down,” he said.

“I thought it was shameful. The government should protect our Charter rights and not side with a nut who vandalizes our ads, which, by the way, we pay for like any other advertisers.”

It’s just charmingly brilliant: they get to pocket atheist’s money, and as soon as some good upstanding Christian whines at a bus driver or throws an egg at the sign, they get to rip the signs down. It’s such a Christian attitude.

Well, they’ve gone even further. One night, while locked in a guarded area, the buses in Kelowna were “professionally” stripped of their godless signage. No one has been caught. The advertising company is shrugging and saying it’s too bad — but the atheists have to replace the ads at their own expense.

The best explanation for this mystery is that the bus ads were raptured. How else to explain their mysterious disappearance, and the way the transit company has suddenly gone all cow-eyed and stupid?

Now I’m really angry, and I’m determined to wreak my vengeance on Kamloops when I arrive, just to teach them a lesson. I think I’ll do something ferocious, like stand in an auditorium and talk. That’ll learn the cowardly bastids.

Episode CCII: This is Kansas?

Lawrence, Kansas is having a loud and aggressive godless event this weekend, ReasonFest, with a nice noisy poster and of course, a noisy video.

You should go and make some noise. Or at least make lots of noise in The Endless Thread. Or if this is all such short notice, there’s also a Berkeley event coming up on the 29th, SkeptiCal. No silence, at any rate, not ever any more.

(Current totals: 12,308 entries with 1,361,001 comments.)

Collusion

Salman Rushdie has an interesting insight into the fate of Osama bin Laden. He hasn’t been an underground agent, stealthily hiding in caves for the last ten years — he’s been living well in prosperous safety in plain sight, with the obvious assistance of…guess who.

Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, was found living at the end of a dirt road 800 yards from the Abbottabad military academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst, in a military cantonment where soldiers are on every street corner, just about 80 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad. This extremely large house had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. And in spite of this we are supposed to believe that Pakistan didn’t know he was there, and that the Pakistani intelligence, and/or military, and/or civilian authorities did nothing to facilitate his presence in Abbottabad, while he ran al Qaeda, with couriers coming and going, for five years?

So Pakistan is exposed as concealing the very fugitive their American allies were supposedly hunting, with Pakistani assistance, and what’s got to be even worse for them, American forces blithely fluttered in to a site right next to a major military installation, took out their targets with no loss of life on the American side, and then just as blithely flew back out again.

There are probably heads rolling right now.

Let them buy yachts

I’m just amazed that Texas citizens will elect congresspeople who will do things like this:

In response to the worst state budget crisis since World War II, the Texas House has proposed slashing $27 billion from the budget, including huge cuts to education, nursing homes, and health care for the poor. Yet last Friday, the Texas House Ways and Means Committee approved a tax break for those who want to buy yachts costing $250,000 or more.

I think every unemployed worker, everyone struggling by on minimum wage, every waitress working for less than minimum wage, every teacher watching her support dwindle, every farmer, every working class person ought to be storming the capitol and lining up the fat cats against the wall…but barring that extreme reaction, shouldn’t we at the very least expect those same people to walk into their voting booths and throw the rascals out?

The saga of Junk DNA

So you’re tantalized by this strange obsession creationists have with junk DNA. It offends them mightily, I think because they find comfort in the idea that everything in the universe must have a purpose, because if it doesn’t, maybe that means they are nothing more than spots of dandruff on a dead rock hurtling blindly through space, and we can’t have that then.

It’s true that the odious Jonathan Wells has written a whole book declaring that everything in the genome has a glorious function implicitly designed by his god, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Larry Moran has begun the process of dismantling Wells, with, so far, three posts critiquing his claims, all well worth reading.

Osama bin Laden disproves Darwin!

Oh, yeah…didn’t you know it was a crack team of Darwinist commandos who took out bin Laden, all to protect our secrets? David Klinghoffer doesn’t go quite that far, but he does demonstrate just how insane the gang at the Discovery Institute have gotten. After all, he does claim that Obama delayed the raid on Osama in order to promote creationism.

President Obama is said to have known the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden since September but chose to wait until May to authorize action against him. Why the delay? Could it perhaps have been to provide a super-timely news hook for the rollout of Jonathan Wells’ new book, The Myth of Junk DNA? If so, an additional note of congratulation is owed to Mr. Obama.

How do you think OBL’s body was identified? By a comparison with his sister’s DNA, evidently those non-coding regions singled out by Darwin defenders, among the pantheon of other mythological evolutionary icons, as functionless “junk.” Indeed, the myth has featured in news coverage of Osama’s death. Reports the website of business magazine Fast Company:

Because your parents give you some of their DNA, they also give your siblings some of the same genetic code — which is why sibling DNA tests work. They sometimes concentrate on areas of the genome called “junk DNA” which serves no biological function but still gets passed along to offspring. By testing for repeat strands of DNA code in these areas, it’s possible to work out if two individuals are related as siblings.

Uh, what? Wells is quite possibly the worst and most dishonest “scholars” employed by the Discovery Institute; I’ve been thinking of picking up a copy of his book simply because it will be hilariously bad. He won’t have shown the utility of junk DNA, but I’m pretty sure he will have do a silly dance while trying to justify his claims…rather like Klinghoffer here.

The reason junk DNA is useful for identification purposes is that it varies so much — it is subject to random change at a higher rate than coding DNA, because it is not subject to functional constraints. It’s been called a genetic fingerprint, and that’s a useful comparison. Think about your fingerprints: you can make a general argument that a pattern of ridges creates a texture useful for gripping, but it’s not important that there be a particular whorl or loop at a specific place. Junk DNA also lacks any specific function, but the analogy only breaks down because it also doesn’t seem to have much of a general function, given that some species like Fugu have lost significant quantities of it. The one purpose I find plausible is that, since cell growth is regulated by the ratio of cytoplasm to nuclear volume, adding junk can lead to an overall increase in cell size.

Somehow, the creationist incomprehension of the basic science is used to argue that evolution didn’t happen.

If Darwin is right, there ought to be huge swaths of ancestral garbage cluttering the genome, serving no purpose other than to identify otherwise unidentified forensic remains. So if those huge swaths turn out after all to be vitally important to the functioning organism, what does that say about Darwin’s theory? Ah, that’s exactly the question addressed in Jonathan Wells’ book.

Hang on. Darwin had no molecular biology and no genetics, knew nothing about DNA, and didn’t even know that chromosomes carried genetic information … he postulated the existence of migratory particles called gemmules that were the units of heredity (he was completely wrong, by the way). His claim to fame is discovering and documenting a mechanism that shapes adaptive heritability, and if anything, he thought selection ought to hone the heritable factors, whatever they were, to a high degree of optimality.

And now the creationists want to argue that junk DNA is a Darwinian prediction? They’ve totally lost the plot.

Explain this to me. Darwin, in their confused minds, claims that there ought to be lots of junk having no purpose other than to identify dead bodies. Junk DNA is used to identify a specific dead body, bin Laden’s. Therefore, Darwin is wrong. Even if I grant them their premise (which I won’t, because it is stupid), this doesn’t work.

Let’s see how many Darwin lobbyists have the guts and honesty to acknowledge that another icon has fallen. They have not, on the whole, left themselves a lot of room for deniability on this.

Gibbering lunatics like Klinghoffer and Wells are actually rather easy to deny.

By the way…

Did you know that this is the last week of classes at UMM, and I’m ooga booga GAH! Heebity heebity heebity boo, wibbledy bobbledy not you too, and jeez I’m gonna hork. Galumphedrin. Yaaah – yaaaah – yaaaaaaaaaaaaieeee. Go away kid, you bother me. Pthththbbbbfhfhththt. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

So. Yes. You were saying? I was saying? What!? Please, can I take a nap now?

Thwock.

I KNOW! Really, I do.

I hope that explains everything.

P.S. I meant that most sincerely, every word of it.