Quaker cannons in a digital age

While everyone here is distracted by the debate over whether a cracker is tasteless bread dough or a sacred slice of man/god meat, the right-wing source of outrage du jour is a widely published photograph of an Iranian missile test in which one of the missiles was clearly photoshopped into the picture. Gary Farber cuts through the crap and points out that yes, government propaganda agencies will lie to you. So?

If the right wing wants to fuel more hysteria to incite war with Iran, though, it seems like a mistake on their part to emphasize that one quarter of their weaponry are digital confabulations.

Another off-the-wall argument against evolution

One of the best things about following the antics of creationists is that it gives you a better appreciation of the creative power of the human mind…which isn’t anywhere near as powerful as reality. Here’s another example of creationist rationalization that doesn’t hold up well under even casual inspection.

With the notable exception of the American Bison most mammals have two separate pleural or lung cavities. As we all know, one side of our chest can be penetrated collapsing that lung, but the other side remains intact and the remaining lung can support life. The bison has what is called an incomplete mediastinum, that is there is but one pleural cavity containing both lungs. Thus the problem for the Native bow hunter with or without a horse is solved. An arrow must only penetrate the chest at any point and both lungs collapse. The fatally wounded animal would only continue a few yards providing unlimited food, clothing and tools. Before the availability of horses bison could be shot by stealth from a blind or other hiding place. One problem is solved yet another serious comes to mind…a problem seldom mentioned, yet demanding an answer.

The problem is for the evolutionist. Other than providing food for hungry people, of what selective advantage is an incompletely divided mediastinum? From an evolutionary sense this makes absolutely no sense. Indeed conventional wisdom would argue for its elimination from the gene pool. Yet it did remain and fed a continent of Native American for centuries. It must indeed require faith and dedication to remain an evolutionist. I am glad I know the Creator of Bison and Native Americans. You can know Him too.

So, wait…God hates bison? Doesn’t this create a logical problem for the creationist, in that God has made the primary large game animal targeted by the Native Americans exceptionally fragile?

And let’s question that assumption: bison aren’t particularly weak, and there’s no reason to assume that selection would work to promote the evolution of dual compartments in the chest cavity — that’s almost certainly an embryological accident in the first place. How many wild animals are running around with only one lung? Not many. If you’re attacked in such a way that your chest cavity is perforated, the only difference between a separated and unseparated mediastinum is whether your death will be slow or quick.

And of course, I thought the Hebrews were the chosen people. How come God didn’t give the Middle East a population of big game animals they could knock over with a good sharp poke?

Canadian Cynic has a nice sharp rebuttal: “…if God had really cared about native Americans, he might have given them immunity to smallpox.”

Any TAM6 attendees here?

In a great big ugly oops, the A/V geeks at TAM6 were not true geeks in that they screwed up and lost all the audio of an entire day’s worth of recordings at the meeting. This is bad, because it means all the clever slams and insults given to Phil Plait will not be passed down to posterity. If you’ve got recordings of the event, contact the skeptics and help them out.

(I suppose we could all just call in and make fresh new jokes at Phil’s expense, but they wouldn’t sync with our lip movements as well.)

Fight back against Bill Donohue!

So far today, I have received 39 pieces of personal hate mail of varying degrees of literacy, all because I was rude to a cracker. Four of them have included death threats, a personal one day record. Thirty-four of them have demanded that I be fired. Twenty-five of them have told me to desecrate a copy of the Koran, instead, or in some similar way offend Muslims, because — in a multiplicity of ironic cluelessness — apparently only some religious icons must be protected, and I would only offend Catholics because they are all so nice that none of them would wish me harm. I even have one email that says I should be fired, that the author would like to kill me, and that I only criticize because Catholics are so gentle and kind.

Oh, and of course, the university president’s office has also received lots of mail demanding my immediate ouster (keep in mind, though…Catholics are no threat to anyone at all.) I don’t know how much, but since Donohue published the president’s email address and not mine, I imagine it’s much greater than what I’ve seen. Those lovely Dark Age fanatics at the Catholic League have started a write-in campaign to start up an inquisition.

So no poll-crashing today. Instead, I would appreciate it if you would write a short note to President Robert Bruininks in support (he’s going to hate me for this). I have to ask for a few constraints, though: only do so if you are willing to sign a real name to it — most of the complaint mail I’m getting uses fake names, making it much less persuasive — and that, unlike the religious screeds I’m seeing, you take the time to proofread and send him something that at least looks like a high school graduate wrote it, which will put you way above the level of the hate mail. Be polite and rational, too!

If you really want to impress, send him regular mail at this address:

President Robert H. Bruininks
202 Morrill Hall
100 Church Street S.E.
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Bill Donohue has a loud, braying voice, and he’s already trying to stir up a witch hunt. We need a counter-campaign from the secular community.

Whoa, this one is getting heavy traffic and we need to close it down and reroute. Continue the discussion here, if you must.

Now I’ve got Bill Donohue’s attention

The Catholic League is preparing a stake for me. They’re going to go straight for the jugular and threaten my job — notice how they repeat that you can access my post from my faculty page, nicely avoiding the fact that the post they find so offensive is not hosted on any university server, and that they are urging everyone to harass the president of my university and the regents and the Minnesota legislature. Extortionists and witch hunters, that’s all these scumbags are.

Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is responding to what happened recently at the University of Central Florida when a student walked out of Mass with the Host, holding it hostage for several days. Myers was angry at the Catholic League for criticizing the student. His post can be accessed from his faculty page on the university’s website.

Here is an excerpt of his July 8 post, “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker!”:

“Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” Myers continued by saying, “if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:

“The Myers blog can be accessed from the university’s website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the ‘Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.’ One of the school’s policies, ‘Code of Conduct,’ says that ‘When dealing with others,’ faculty et al. must be ‘respectful, fair and civil.’ Accordingly, we are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.

“It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.”

When dealing with others, I must be respectful, fair and civil. Hmmm. Doesn’t seem to say anything about when dealing with crackers.

That last paragraph is marvelously blind. Hey, Bill! I can think of something more vile! How about intentionally desecrating the bodies of young altar boys who respect the position of trust held by Catholic priests? I think that is a lot more vile than mistreating a cracker. In fact, I can think of innumerable vile acts going on all around the world right now, and not all of them even involve Catholicism. It takes the moral vacuum of a purblind ideological bigot like Bill Donohue to think that goring his sacred cow is the worst thing in the world.

What is Atheist Nexus’s game?

There is a new social network site for godless folk, called Atheist Nexus. Good idea, except that there may be a little problem.

A few doubting atheists (how could they possibly be suspicious?) investigated the site before signing up, and discovered some discrepencies. The fax number and mail server are shared with some outfit called the Divine Christian Center (warning: if you click on that link, the site autoplays Christian rock at you). The creator, who goes by the name Thor and Kym Membe, is also the registrant on both domains. He claims that he is an atheist, he just happens to also be a web design freelancer who was commissioned to work on the DCC site. That sounds perfectly plausible, and I’d accept that as an explanation, except that this message turns up on a bible college site:

We have seen a steady increase in uncommon and deadly events around the world – most recently, the quake in China and the cyclone in Myanmar. This is a call to prayer for the suffering and the hurting. God is calling us all to humble ourselves before Him in prayer. We may not understand what is happening; we may not have answers for anyone asking. One thing we should know without a shadow of doubt is that God loves the world and all who are in it. Let’s join forces and pray for those in China and Myanmar. Let’s lift them up before God and ask that He comforts those who need comfort and bring healing to those who need it. Let’s pray for the little boys and girls who have lost their parents, and for the everyone who has lost someone or something.

Kym Membe
Mattoon , USA

Hmmm. That doesn’t sound very atheist-like to me.

It’s all a little fishy. Maybe very fishy — this could be an evangelical group fishing for atheist names and email addresses. Or it could be an innocent case of an industrious web designer getting work with diverse groups.

There aren’t any grounds to flee Atheist Nexus just yet, but it looks like they need a little more in-depth scrutiny. Maybe some of the godless experts in networks and security that hang out here will want to chase down the details.