Porcine vengeance

You really don’t want to know what goes on inside a slaughterhouse. That way, you’d never hear about toxic pig brain mist.

In a rapid-fire process that is noisy, smelly and bloody, severed pigs’ heads are cut up at the head table at a rate of more than 1,100 an hour. Workers slice off the cheek and snout meat, then insert a nozzle in the head and blast air inside until the light pink mush that is the brain tissue squirts out from the base of the skull.

This is in the news right now because Minnesota slaughterhouse workers are coming down with an autoimmune disease, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), that is thought to be caused by the exposure to all the brain matter flying around in those environments. Exposure to the antigens in the pig nervous tissue is triggering the workers’ immune systems to attack their own nerves.

I’m swearing off pig brains forevermore, I promise.

(via Yet Another Web Site)

North Dakota teacher threatens students with hell

Remember that awful, nonsensical “Letter from Hell” on GodTube? It was a particularly contemptible example of the evangelical impulse — the message was that not only will you suffer horribly in hell if you are naughty, but all your friends will, too…and it’ll be all your fault.

Would you believe a schoolteacher showed that video in a public school?

It’s a patently evangelical video for an especially disgusting version of the Christian cult, it plainly says that its purpose is to “help teens share Christ with their friends,” it was downloaded from Godtube, and it was shown in a class with a Jewish student (the only Jewish family in all of North Dakota*).

The teacher’s excuse? It was intended to show the dangers of drunk driving.

Yeah, right. The reason you shouldn’t drink and drive is that you might end up practicing your penmanship in hell. Isn’t it enough to say that you might end up dead or injured, or you might kill or injure someone else?

Besides, isn’t threatening kids in North Dakota with hell kind of like promising them an upgrade?**

*I probably exaggerate.

**I kid, I kid.

The Golden Compass

I suspect that many reviews of this movie are going to begin with some variant of the sentiment, “I was disappointed.” This one is no exception. It’s just not a very good movie; it’s one that packed in lots of miscellaneous detail from the book it is based on, but thereby threw away the core of the story … and it shows. It’s a movie that races along inventively, but futilely, leaving you wondering at the end what the point of all the rushing about of armies of strange characters was all about.

[Read more…]

Sneaky College Christianists

American River College has, as most colleges do, a student body organization that is elected by the students. They recently had their elections, and got a bit of a surprise: the right-wing Christian group had organized, appealed to the student on the basis of their shared religious beliefs, and swept the election. It also helped that they could call on ethnic identities — Sacramento apparently has had an influx of Slavic immigrants with an odd(er) and often rather nasty form of the Christian cult. These are the Slavic Christian groups that are hysterically homophobic—it’s evident on their club forum, too.

EVERYWHERE I LOOK, ON TV IN SCHOOL EVERYWHERE BUT IN CHURCH ALL I SEE IS GAY THIS, GAY RIGHTS THAT OPEN DISPLAYS OF THIER LIFESTYLE BEING PUSHED DOWN OUR THROATS, I KNOW THAT JESUS LOVES THE SINNER BUT HATES THE SIN, IT JUST APEARS THAT, THAT SIN IS BEING THRUST UPON US IS THERE NOTHING THAT CAN BE DONE, IS THIS WHAT WE HAVE TO LOOK FORWARD TO, SODOMITES RUNNING AROUND, OPENLY PROMOTING THIER LIFESTYLE, GAY MARRIAGE, GAY PASTORS, GAY CHURCHES, ITS LIKE GETTING OUT OF CONTROL, AND ITS VERY SAD TO SEE THIS DAY COME TO LIGHT, AND THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT.
THATS THE SADDEST THING EVER

They also seem to have a deep-rooted aversion to the period. And isn’t that just the cutest little example of suppressed homosexuality ever? All the pushing down throats and thrusting, and the poor little ranter is just so helpless.

Anyway, they organized and they got elected, which is fair enough. It’s still worrisome that people can be so easily manipulated by a candidate who is clearly batshit insane, but just the religious testimonial is enough to sway them. It’s what I dread about American elections in general: they are dominated by looney appeals to religious nonsense, and rational choice does not seem to come into it.

Of course, the fortunate thing about this petty coup is that, well, student organizations have some power to manage internal affairs, but don’t really have much say in the larger picture of running the college. This sentiment is absurdly impractical:

The other former member club member elected to the Student Association, Dennis Choban, listed his goals on his Student Association application form. They included “removing humanistic bias from certain courses (such as evolution science), and encouraging live discussion of nontraditional views in all classes.”

Student group leaders know that what is involved is largely sitting in meetings and managing paperwork that gets financial support from the administration flowing to campus organizations. If they go into this expecting to be able to purge gays, liberals, and evilutionists from the faculty, boy, are they ever going to be disappointed. And then there’ll be the laughing in their faces and the wasted effort and the growing sense of futility. But who knows, they seem to be repressed bottoms, they might like it.

DId you all catch Comer on Science Friday?

It was short, mainly taken up with Chris Comers trying to tell her side of the story, and not getting it all in within the time allotted. The main points I got out of it were:

  • It sure sounds like this was a planned expulsion, with pressure being applied for weeks ahead of the incident that prompted it.

  • It’s not entirely clear, but this does not sound like a voluntary resignation. She was sandbagged with a letter from the Bush appointee, Lizzette Reynolds, that opened with a statement that she had committed a firing offense; she was later summoned without warning to a long meeting that grilled her over the “problem”; and she was then summoned to the Human Resources director’s office. Perhaps she signed a resignation letter, but this was not a case where she was given any choice.

  • At the last Texas Education Agency textbook approval session, McLeroy invited the whole board of the Discovery Institute to testify, as well as Eugenie Scott. Scott was scheduled last … and came up to speak at 2am. What a sneaky way to make sure the opposition is ignored!

  • The real bad guy is being exposed: Glenn Branch of the NCSE was openly credited with being the fellow who sent the email that got Comers fired. Phooey. Now everyone will know who the Secret Satan at the NCSE is.

LOLScience, now?

Those cats are just everywhere — now lolcats can has science. Even worse, it’s dominated by geology LOLcats. Geologists are too abrasive and intrusive to have a sense of humor, and it takes ages for them to tell a joke.

I do have something to say to physics cat, though.

i-194359f925451b0aa2d36c9b0cd8db8c-physics_cat.jpg

Here, kitty kitty. I have a box, a geiger counter, and some cyanide for you.

A Christmas Carol

Hank Fox sent me the link to this lovely little ditty. I don’t know why he didn’t forward it to Bill O’Reilly or Bill Donohue.

I hope you have headphones if you try to listen to this in a public place. And do try to avoid singing along.

On that appeal to you sentimental bastards, let me mention another thing: a webblogger in this holiday season in difficult straits. It’s going to get uglier still in the future, I suspect, since this collapsing housing bubble is going to hurt a lot of people in real estate, finance, property management, etc. Kevin Hayden of the American Street is in that position — if anyone can help him out, please do.

For the War on Christmas.