What are we, lepers?

Elizabeth Dole is continuing her campaign in North Carolina of smearing her opponent, Kay Hagan, for simply associating with atheists. We atheists are the “most vile, radical liberals in America,” out to wage war on Christmas and stock boy scout troops with homosexuals, and we actively support political candidates who are atheists. I know … how dare we.

I have a personal reason to be offended, however. The Dole ads cite endorsements by two atheists, FriendlyAtheist.com and DaylightAtheism.org. Now hang on…what’s so scary about the Friendly atheist? And Daylight Atheism sounds positively pleasant. Couldn’t they find one mean, cruel, truly frightening atheist to give a testimonial, like maybe one with an obscure and somewhat intimidatingly intellectual name?

Yeah, I’m feeling left out.

I will say anyway that if you live in North Carolina and you have an opportunity to vote for the open-minded and thoughtful Kay Hagan and against the Rovian slimebeast named Elizabeth Dole, please do so. If she’s got the endorsement of the Friendly Atheist and Daylight Atheism and even Pharyngula, you know she’s on the side of goodness and light.

Wreckers

Some guy named Quentin Letts made a list of the 50 people who wrecked Britain. I’m a bit handicapped in reading it, since I don’t know who Quentin Letts is, and I have never heard of 9/10ths of the people being damned by him, but I did recognize a few, like Tony Blair and this guy:

Anti-religionist Dawkins, the best-known English dissenter since Darwin, is the merciless demander of provable fact.

He is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and tours the world lecturing the elites of the West that they are stupid to believe in any god.

He proselytises against the proselytisers, most of his targets wishing they had a fraction of his apparent certainty.

He is the anti-preacher whose sermons are designed to erode churchgoing and, with that, weaken our happiness.

A man less obsessed with himself and with the narrow calculations of men in white coats might realise that religion, although never offering proof of God’s existence, can sugar catastrophe and brighten chasms.

In times of turbulence, the human being is little different from the vole or the dormouse. It will take shelter where it can.

No amount of superior lecturing from an anti-Christ, not even one with so important a title as his, will alter that.

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Typical apologetic rubbish. Atheists aren’t trying to weaken anyone’s happiness; atheists are happy without god. We’ve discovered that you don’t need a veneer of lies to make it through life, and that the truth and reality and the real world are satisfying and beautiful — and that the nonsense the priests tell you is squalid and pathetic. The Trinity is a feeble glimmer next to the glory of the Calculus, Genesis is a short, limping, clumsy limerick next to the epic poetry of Evolution, and the mewling whining of sanctimonious theologians is a simpering whimper drowned out in the vigor and rigor of good, roaring science.

I actively despise this attitude that the purpose of an idea is to be a band-aid against reality — that the virtue of religion is glossing over pain with happy lies and wishful illusions. Yes, in times of turbulence we should seek shelter…but real shelter, in ideas of substance that can provide real help, not this dishonest sugarcoating.

He’s right, though, that it’s often tough to get people to accept the strength of reality when there’s always a slithering pack of lying con-artists always ready to provide glib promises of prosperity and immortality and love eternal at no greater cost than throwing away one’s intellect and integrity to believe in a fantasy. I guess Letts’ idea of what wrecks a country is a bit different than mine: I can see the ruin of my country all around me in the acceptance of the false dream of faith and the blind obedience to pious authority. I know, it feels so good to close one’s eyes and pretend all is well while the chaos rises all around, and damn those people yelling “WAKE UP!” — but they aren’t the wreckers. They’re the only genuine hope we’ve got.

GFP wins Nobel Prize!

The Nobel in Chemistry this year goes to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien for the discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein, GFP. That’s well deserved — GFP is a wonderful tool, a simple protein that fluoresces. There are lots of fluorescent compounds out there, and most of them require some kind of artificial injection or application to get them into cells — they basically allow you to determine that “a needle was stuck in here“, and also to allow us to visualize the morphology of individual cells, which is all very useful, and there’s quite an industry built around making new probes of this sort. GFP is different. It allows one to use the molecular biology of the cell to generate your green glowing compound. If you want to know when and where a particular gene of interest is expressed, for instance, you just make a construct that couples the regulatory elements of that gene to a GFP gene, and presto, where ever the gene you’re following is turned on, so is GFP, and the cell lights up like a little Christmas tree decoration. That’s powerful stuff: it gives us a tool to follow patterns of gene expression visually, in real time, in living cells.

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Wave those arms in praise of MSKGEELFTG VVPVLVELDG DVNGQKFSVS GEGEGDATYG KLTLNFICTT GKLPVPWPTL VTTFSYGVQC FSRYPDHMKQ HDFFKSAMPE GYVQERTIFY KDDGNYKTRA EVKFEGDTLV NRIELKGIDF KEDGNILGHK MEYNYNSHNV YIMGDKPKNG IKVNFKIRHN IKDGSVQLAD HYQQNTPIGD GPVLLPDNHY LSTQSALSKD PNEKRDHMIL LEFVTAARIT HGMDELYK!

    1 atgagtaaag gagaagaact tttcactgga gtggtcccag ttcttgttga attagatggc 
   61 gatgttaatg ggcaaaaatt ctctgtcagt ggagagggtg aaggtgatgc aacatacgga 
  121 aaacttaccc ttaattttat ttgcactact gggaagctac ctgttccatg gccaacactt 
  181 gtcactactt tctcttatgg tgttcaatgc ttctcaagat acccagatca tatgaaacag 
  241 catgactttt tcaagagtgc catgcccgaa ggttatgtac aggaaagaac tatattttac 
  301 aaagatgacg ggaactacaa gacacgtgct gaagtcaagt ttgaaggtga tacccttgtt 
  361 aatagaatcg agttaaaagg tattgatttt aaagaagatg gaaacattct tggacacaaa 
  421 atggaataca actataactc acataatgta tacatcatgg gagacaaacc aaagaatggc 
  481 atcaaagtta acttcaaaat tagacacaac attaaagatg gaagcgttca attagcagac 
  541 cattatcaac aaaatactcc aattggcgat ggccctgtcc ttttaccaga caaccattac 
  601 ctgtccacac aatctgccct ttccaaagat cccaacgaaa agagagatca catgatcctt 
  661 cttgagtttg taacagctgc taggattaca catggcatgg atgaactata caaa

I need to take a shower after reading that

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Occasionally, John Derbyshire gets kudos from the pro-science side of the national snarl because he at least manages to recognize that Intelligent Design creationism is a load of lies and pseudoscience. I’ve been less than thrilled with the guy; he’s generally a creepy fellow who only advocates science as a prop to his bizarre ideological fantasies. The latest example: he opposes Obama because he will destroy the biological sciences. Why, you might ask? It’s a peculiar assertion, since virtually every biologist I know considers the Republican party to have been a disaster for American science, and like Obama’s positions on science policy. Just the fact that he’s willing to encourage stem cell research is a major step forward.

The reason Derbyshire predicts Obama will stop science cold is that the presidential candidate is a black man who dislikes the idea that modern genetics will demonstrate the inferiority of certain races.

To support his claim, he babbles approvingly about Herrnstein and Murray’s awful book, The Bell Curve, and cites a “genomics researcher” who must remain anonymous because the cultural Marxists who dominate the research industry will destroy him…unfortunately, he uses a pseudonym familiar to me — “Godless Capitalist” — and I know his internet ravings well. He’s a garden-variety racist who misuses genetics as window-dressing for his delusions. Just to give you an idea of how repugnant and stupid this guy is, here’s a little anecdote told by Derbyshire that tells you how clueless Derbyshire is, and how vilely misogynist and bigoted “Godless Capitalist” is:

When “Godless” was helping me get up to speed on this stuff, I asked him at one point: “What’s the difference between a geneticist and a genomicist?” He gave a very cute answer: “Geneticists are female, genomicists are male.” Asked to elaborate, he offered this: “Imagine you are walking down a corridor in a research institute, looking in through the glass panels in doors. In one lab you see a young woman of nontrivial attractiveness carefully adding drops to a Petri dish from a pipette. That’s a geneticist. A couple of doors along you look into another lab and there are two young guys arguing about some long string of numbers displayed on a computer screen. Those are genomicists …”

I guess this guy never heard of Pardis Sabeti or Anne Carpenter or Dannie Durand or any of a bunch of other female genomics researchers I can think of. Or the even larger number of male geneticists out there. And why does attractiveness even come into this?

That’s a rhetorical question. It’s because these happy chatting bigots are always judging ideas by superficial appearances, by sex or skin color or racial and sexual stereotypes.

Obama vs. Cranky Grampa

We have another debate coming up shortly, so here’s an open thread for you all to chatter on…if the software lets you.

There will be no drinking games allowed that encourage alcohol consumption every time POW is mentioned.

<sigh> If ever I hear the words “my friends” again, I shall gag.

Defining moment for me was when McCain insisted that Obama was dangerous because he would speak too loudly (while later castigating him for advocating diplomacy), and Obama came back to point out that McCain was the one singing “bomb bomb bomb, bomb Iran”. In other words, McCain was a desperate fraud while Obama was calm and well-spoken.

Although I also felt Obama was thin on specifics and rich in politician-speak. He didn’t thrill me, but he was solidly better than his opponent.

Oh, yeah…and when McCain called Obama “that one”. That was condescending and creepy.

Site problems

Scienceblogs is experiencing some technical difficulties right now: the guts of the machine are being very recalcitrant and generating time-out errors all over the place. Please be patient and heed the message when making comments: getting an error when posting does not necessarily mean the comment did not get posted. Most often, it just means that the MovableType software has gotten very, very stupid.

And if you think you’re having problems with comments, you can’t imagine how bad it is for us trying to post articles. I just tried to create a new entry, and went off to a doctor’s appointment while waiting for the window to open.