The effect of porn on male fertility

Once again, I bravely plunge into the fascinating world of kinky sex research in humans. This time, we learn something incredibly useful. Gentleman, would you like to know how to improve the potency of your semen? Do you need a good excuse to give your significant other when she catches you browsing porn sites? Do you want another excuse to sneer at those pompous business types who flaunt their fancy cell phones? Here’s the study for you.

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I’ll take anger over sleaze any day

I don’t quite understand this etiquette thing. So Maryscott O’Connor is angry about war and corruption and our incompetent administration, and that’s bad. Naughty leftist, she should be better mannered and respectful to our president, no matter how badly he screws up.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin sics her mouth-breathing minions on some college-aged peace activists, and they get swamped with death threats from right wingers. And she does it twice, even after learning what kind of sewage her pals are spewing.

Hmmm. Decisions, decisions. Angry denunciations of political actions vs. vicious but infantile threats. Unstinting demands that our leaders do right vs. outrageous extortion. Which side do I want to be on?

I’ll pick the door on the left, Bob. Without hesitation.

Hey, and could someone point David Finkel to a real story about bloggers?

You’ve got to hand it to TBogg for giving the Malkins the treatment they deserve.

They do everything

By way of Over My Med Body, I found this article that finds new virtues for seafood: it reduces anti-social behavior. This is great news! I plan to announce when I’m feeling cranky here at the Myers household, which will prompt an immediate serving of tasty salmon. I’m going to be eating fish every day!

Well, maybe not…I’m really not that cranky. But it is yet another piece touting the virtues of polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially the essential ω-3 fatty acids in which sea food is rich, so it reinforces my preferences, anyway.

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Killfile!

I try to avoid censoring people here, and it takes some persistent nuisance value to get evicted. There are a few people, though, who really don’t add any value to the site, even though they haven’t done anything (yet) to warrant banning them. A reader sent me this script many of you might find useful: it requires Firefox and the greasemonkey plugin, and what it does is chop comments by certain people out of the page, so you don’t have to see them, or even see comments by people that refer to them. Cool—a www killfile!

If you’re interested, click here to download it. It’s currently set to kill comments by “JMcH” (I know there is now a sudden surge of interest), but as it’s simply a text file, it looks like it would be easy to edit to zap comments by anyone (even “PZ Myers”).

Maybe the author will speak up in the comments and help anyone out who has trouble getting it to work…please don’t ask me, though, I’m providing this as is.

Which is more contagious, bigotry or homosexuality?

It’s Pride Week at UMM, so it’s timely to mention the dissection of Paul Cameron’s latest mangling of science and statistics. Cameron, if you’ve never heard of him, is an anti-gay bigot who publishes sloppy analyses to ‘prove’ that homosexuals are bad people, and has recently published yet another of his screeds in the Journal of Biosocial Science.

Apparently, homosexuality is contagious. Am I at risk if I attend any of the gay pride events this week? Will Hedwig and the Angry Inch turn me into a transsexual? Knowing that the author is Paul Cameron reassures me that my wife and I have nothing to worry about.

Creepy killer’s blog

You may have heard the disturbing news story about the Oklahoma murderer/pedophile/cannibal—just to make it a little creepier, he had a blog. (I don’t expect it will stay up for too long, so read The Insomnia Report for excerpts.)

He says things like this:

I mean it, I really need a girlfriend. It’s not just depressing anymore, it’s actually starting to have a negative effect on my mental state I think. For example, my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird. If people knew the kinds of things I think about anymore, I’d probably be locked away. No probably about it, I know I would be.

Mostly, though, he comes off as pathetic and banal.

Easter brings out the insipid

Take, for instance, Richard Harries:

This Easter, as usual, the Christian church will proclaim its central theme that, in Jesus, God shares our human anguish to the full and, through the resurrection, gives us hope that in the end all evil, including death, will be left behind. This God calls us to let the divine purpose of compassion work in and through us, to do what Jewish tradition calls repairing the world. It is the most sublime story of God ever told, the most deeply moving account of what it is for God to be God. No one doubts that there are real difficulties in believing it, but for atheism to ring true, it must at least betray the occasional sigh of pity that it’s not true.

Why, no, no sighs of pity here. The resurrection is a made-up story; it gives me no hope at all. It does give hope to con-artists everywhere, though, I’m sure.

I don’t find the story particularly sublime, either. “Absurd” is a better word for it, and for that reason I don’t find it moving at all. How does it tell us anything about the nature of this god? He’s simultaneously omnipotent and human, killable and not killable, capable of creating whole universes yet unable to pull out a few nails. If Christians weren’t so thoroughly indoctrinated into the whole mess from an early age, instead of being moved they’d be baffled.