I am pleased to report that the godless heathens of Seattle, including the likes of Ophelia Benson (who, I learned, was once bitten by a gorilla, and thereby acquired the superpowers of strength, ferocity, and calm) and Dana Hunter, know how to close out a bar. Once again, a horde of cheerful chatty atheists had to be shooed out at closing time.
Too many to list showed up, but several of the previously less voluble have agreed to comment more. Here is their chance: introduce yourselves!
It’s been a while. I hope you haven’t forgotten. Here’s an easy one to get you back in the swing of things.
Do you think The Ten Commandments should be displayed in government buildings?”
Yes
76%
No
23%
Undecided
1%
It seems rather silly to post a bunch of laws, most of which everyone in the building will cheerfully ignore.
This is a rather horrifying article about young girls reading Harry Potter one moment, and then dragged off to get their clitorises chopped off. It’s got these nasty little details like, if you pay extra, you can get the butcher to use a clean knife.
But there’s an odd disjoint here, too. It’s the UK, a modern western nation. They have laws to prohibit mangling children.
The UK Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 makes it an offence to carry out FGM or to aid, abet or procure the service of another person. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, makes it against the law for FGM to be performed anywhere in the world on UK permanent residents of any age and carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment. To date, no prosecutions have been made under UK legislation.
That’s clear: a strict law and strong penalties, but no prosecutions — so it must be an effective law, right?
Wrong.
Some 500 to 2,000 British schoolgirls will be genitally mutilated over the summer holidays. Some will be taken abroad, others will be “cut” or circumcised and sewn closed here in the UK by women already living here or who are flown in and brought to “cutting parties” for a few girls at a time in a cost-saving exercise.
It’s happening right now. It seems to me that there ought to be 500-2000 arrests in the UK this year, maybe more, since they’ve got a 7 year backlog of neglected criminality.
If medical neglect of children can be a prosecutable crime here in benighted America, why isn’t the UK doing something to stop active, vicious mutilation of children?
In a great victory for history, a very rare 19th century MP3 has been recovered which documents a moment in Charles Darwin’s domestic life. It seems that there was a bit of unreported conflict between them…
One of the giant panels I was on at Convergence is now a podcast at the Secular Buddhist. It’s got me, Bug Girl, Jennifer Ouellette, Lyra Lynx, Maria Walters, Jen Mana, Ted Meissner, Debbie Goddard, Carrie Iwan, and Dave Walbridge, and I’m already worn out just listing them. It was also very well attended: SF conventions are hotbeds of godlessness.
Well, this was a weird article in Nature that made me think, at least: A world without mosquitoes. I was surprised to learn that there are actually ecologists/entomologists who believe the world would be a better place if we could simply exterminate entire genera of winged pests — that mosquitoes fill a readily replaceable niche, that they make minimal positive contributions to ecosystems, and we’d gain immeasurably from removing animals responsible for so much human suffering. The one thing they also agree on, though, is that there is no way to do it.
And so, while humans inadvertently drive beneficial species, from tuna to corals, to the edge of extinction, their best efforts can’t seriously threaten an insect with few redeeming features. “They don’t occupy an unassailable niche in the environment,” says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. “If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over.”
The article does mention mosquitoes immense contributions to biomass in general in many environments, particularly in the arctic, but this doesn’t seem to perturb the mosquito-haters. It’s odd, since I live in Minnesota, where we get clouds of the bitin’ beasts, and they are regarded as major nuisances…but at the same time everyone understands that they also feed the fish that stock our lakes. I don’t think a widespread mosquito extinction program would be entirely popular.
The commenters on the article seem much more sensible. I was happy to see one quoting Aldo Leopold:
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
The article mentions, for instance, that every animal in an arctic caribou herd loses 300 mL of blood a day to the depredations of mosquito swarms, which is definitely horrific for the caribou—but that’s biomass that’s getting transferred to birds and bats and fish. It seems to me that preventing that would be a rather substantial blow against species diversity, even if it did make some big charismatic mammals much more comfortable.
Alayna Wyland is 7 months old, and she is suffering.
The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye.
There are pictures at the link. It’s not pretty. I know if my babies had a growth that was almost the size of a tennis ball that was destroying their face, I’d have been camped out at the hospital. But not Alayna’s parents! They have a special treatment plan.
The Wylands and their church reject medical care in favor of faith-healing — anointing with oil, laying on of hands, prayer and fasting. The parents testified at a juvenile court hearing last week that they never considered getting medical attention for Alayna.
According to court documents, Rebecca Wyland anointed Alayna with oil each time she changed the girl’s diaper and wiped away the yellow discharge that seeped daily from the baby’s left eye.
There they go with the magic anointing oil again! Does that stuff do anything? If we can waste time with homeopathy, maybe it’s about time someone did some clinical trials with anointing oil and put that crap to rest (not that it would make a bit of difference…).
The Wylands are rather vile, but at least this is taking place in Oregon, where “it is a crime for parents to intentionally and knowingly withhold necessary and adequate medical attention from their children”. Alayna has been placed in state custody for treatment, and both parents have been charged with first degree criminal mistreatment.
But wait, there’s more! The father was previously married.
Wyland’s first wife, Monique, died of breast cancer in 2006. She had not sought or received medical treatment for the condition, said Dr. Christopher Young, a deputy state medical examiner who signed the death certificate.
She died of untreated breast cancer? That poor woman — that’s a hard death, an agonizing death, and often, an unnecessary death — can that entire wretched cult be indicted for torture-murder? They seem to be leaving quite a pile of dead women and children.
Wait, wait, this story makes no sense.
A gay netball coach fired from a Christchurch Christian school has gained compensation and an apology.
The 28-year-old man was employed as a girls’ netball coach at Middleton Grange School in February, but said he was sacked by the board of trustees after members discovered his sexual orientation.
A gay man was fired from his job as coach of a girls’ team? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to fire him if he were heterosexual?
Oh, it’s a religious school. They specialize in stuff that makes no sense.
The case of the various kinds of blogs hosted on ScienceBlogs has come up on Newsweek, and I get quoted trying to explain how I’m unperturbed by a couple of institutional blogs here.
Not all bloggers feel this way, Myers included. “We’ve known about those [institutional blogs] for some time–they aren’t a problem,” he wrote in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK. “Those sites were set up under the same conditions as the blogs of corporate scientist Mark Chu-Carroll, who works at Google, and university scientist PZ Myers, who works at the University of Minnesota. … [The Pepsi blog blurred] the boundary between advertising and content. I agree that the institutional blogs also blur that boundary, just not quite as much. I can’t insist that their blogs be labeled as advertisements, unless I want my blog marked as an ad for the University of Minnesota, or Chu-Carroll’s as an ad for Google. It’s complicated and messy.”
There is some confusion out there, however. I do not claim to represent the University of Minnesota. Mark Chu-Carroll did not claim to speak for Google. My point was that if you take any blogger and look at the chains of affiliations they have (as we all do), we do not try to argue that every possible connection is a direct conflict of interest that demands a prominent disclaimer on the web page.
We ought to reserve the term “ad” for situations where an interest has paid money to be promoted, as PepsiCo did. The Weizmann Institute did not. Google did not pay to have Chu-Carroll peddle the company line, and he didn’t. The University of Minnesota did not pay to have me scare away recruit potential students, although I may have done one or the other, accidentally. Weizmann, SETI, and Brookhaven have that in common with me and Chu-Carroll, and none of us cross the ethical barrier in the same way that PepsiCo did.
I actually think it’s a good idea for institutions to have blogs at places like Scienceblogs. One thing I mentioned (but was not quoted) in my email to Newsweek is that the real challenge for institutional blogs is for them to be interesting. I rather like this quote from Carl Zimmer that summarizes their problem:
I do not, for example, assume that a piece of research is actually important just because a press release says it is. Imagine a press release with the headline, “Minor study published that is really not all it claims to be.” Such things just don’t exist.
This isn’t exactly schadenfreude, it’s more like merely recognizing the ungainly nature of the beast — but blog networks are always going to struggle a bit. Take a look at these posts from the Nature Network. It’s not doom-and-gloom, it’s just wrestling with the medium, as we’ve experienced here in recent weeks.
I do have a solution for any financial problems, though: we just need to peddle more T&A and celebrity gossip, like Huffpo. Isn’t that a bit illiberal, though, to build your brand on the backs of salacious stories about women? Not to mention the quackery and woo.
Although I guess I am also guilty of building an audience with blatant T&A*, too.
*Only in my case, that stands for “tentacles and arms”.
