Another “solution”

A Christian football player from Texas (obviously, that’s all you need to be fully qualified to provide answers to everything) offers his answer to the problem of school shootings.

No, you absolute numpty. It’s the guns. European countries have a higher divorce rate than the US, and don’t have anywhere near the number of mass shootings we do. Mongolia has a lower rate, and when was the last time you read about schools getting shot up there? There isn’t even a hint of a correlation.

This “marriage is a covenant” nonsense is a tool evangelicals use to trap and dominate women. It’s an ugly, manipulative tactic.

Ken Ham loves it.

Here’s an excellent summary of that exercise in patriarchal thinking, in case you never heard of John MacArthur or The Master’s University and Seminary.

See, for example, yesterday’s Houston Chronicle article, which details how for decades in the Southern Baptist Convention “survivors and others who reported [sexual] abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action . . . even if it meant convicted molesters continued in ministry.”

And for another example, see the recent New York Times article about a conservative pastor in Fort Smith, Arkansas who was pushed out of his pulpit because he used the acronym “BLM” in his blog, and because he refused to head down the QAnon rabbit hole with his congregants.

One of the best sources on scandal-a-minute evangelicalism is the Roys Report. Established by investigative journalist Julie Roys, the Report “is a Christian media outlet, reporting the unvarnished truth about what’s happening in the Christian community so the church can be reformed and restored.” Determined to expose the seamy side of what she refers to as the “evangelical industrial complex,” the intrepid, persistent, and apparently fearless Roys has done remarkable work in exposing appalling truths about evangelical luminaries and institutions such as Mark Driscoll, Ravi Zacharias, Hillsong, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Liberty University, James MacDonald and Harvest Bible Chapel, Matt Chandler and Acts 29, and Thomas White and Cedarville University (about which we also have written a great deal – here’s one example).

But near the top of Roys’ investigative hit parade is John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and chancellor emeritus of The Master’s University and Seminary (TMUS). In the past 27 months, Roys has written (I think I have the count right) 47 posts on MacArthur and his institutions (not to mention additional podcasts). In these articles she has detailed MacArthur’s claims that there is no pandemic (it’s a Satanic deception, which would be news to the families of the over 1 million Americans who have died from COVID) and his church’s and schools’ failure to report COVID cases; she has highlighted MacArthur’s huge salaries and wealth, blatant nepotism, and determination to keep financial details of his institutions a secret; and, she has reported accusations of plagiarism against the chancellor emeritus.

On top of all that corruption, MacArthur also believes “marriage is a covenant”…or, in other words, marriage is a prison for women.

This spring, Roys has focused on how MacArthur and his minions, taking a page out of the Southern Baptist Convention playbook, have a history of minimizing and covering up sexual abuse. Here a few examples:

And there is more. And all of this is in keeping with what John Street, chair of the graduate program in biblical counseling at TMUS, has taught his students:

  • A Christian wife should endure abuse by a non-Christian husband in the same way that missionaries endure persecution.
  • By enduring abuse a wife may win her husband to Christ.
  • When both spouses are Christian, the wife should rely on church processes, as government authorities must be the absolute last resort.
  • Domestic violence shelters are terrible places, as they teach women to be assertive.
  • The only grounds for divorce are unrepentant adultery and abandonment.

I watched my grandmother suffer for years in an abusive, broken marriage, and I don’t think she ever tried to get out of it. I think the last decades of her life would have been much happier if she could have escaped, although it probably would have accelerated my grandfather’s decline.

It’s a Marcus thing

People were wondering why I put a picture of a Fight Club bar of soap on my post about Marcus Ranum. It’s because he’s a maker — he makes things like bars of soap. I should have just used my own bar of Marcus Ranum soap, but as you’ll see below, it’s been in my office gathering cat hair.

I also have one of his knives.

If ever I have to fight off a crazed attacker, that would be my weapon of choice. It’s wicked sharp and pointy. And then I could wash the blood off with a bar of soap.

Everyone, keep an eye on Marcus, he’s home alone.

Attention spans are ridiculously short

Hey! Remember these hot news stories?

There are probably some other major events, but I forgot them.

Can an entire country, or possibly an entire species, come down with acute Alzheimer’s disease?

The Peterson delusion

Yesterday, Jackson Wheat sent me a link to this ‘discussion’ between Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins. I don’t recommend listening to it. I only made it through the first 5 minutes before the gag reflex kicked in. Peterson does most of the talking; the opening is Peterson simpering about how Bill C16 was compelled speech, and Dawkins agreeing and praising his courage.

You’ll understand why I then glanced at the timer and saw it was an hour and a half long and closed it with a few disgusted curses.

Then an excerpt from somewhere later in the video was posted on Twitter. It’s mostly Peterson explaining why two intertwined snakes are representations of DNA, which he saw clearly while on psilocybin. It is totally bonkers. It’s stupid and insane and infantile.

A brief summary if you don’t want to listen to it (or if, like me, you don’t want to listen to it a second time).

It reminded me a bit of that old video, much loved by creationists, in which creationists got into his office on the pretext of a filming an interview, and he just stopped, arrested by his British reserve, and was too polite to give them the ass-kicking they deserved. Jordan Peterson is a stark raving batshit dipsy-doodle con man.

It’s too bad Dawkins couldn’t see that the rest of Peterson’s schtick is just as groundless and loony.

Another map!

This one speaks for itself.

California’s rate of gun deaths has declined by 10% since 2005, even as the national rate has climbed in recent years. And Texas and Florida? Their rates of gun deaths have climbed 28% and 37% respectively. California now has one of the 10 lowest rates of gun deaths in the nation. Texas and Florida are headed in the wrong direction.

It’s too bad that data and evidence are irrelevant to what the Republicans will do.

Cool.

Spider battles a wasp!

I know a lot of people here dislike spider photos, but this is a video, and it’s a battle between a handsome Steatoda and a much larger wasp. Usually wasps win these kinds of fight, but not in this case, which made me happy.

Also, watch the spider pause once the wasp is lethally envenomated, step towards the camera, and preen for a bit before going back to hog-tie the beast. Bravo!

[Read more…]

A geography lesson, with automobiles

A few fleeting thoughts about these maps:

  • I notice that the two states in which I lived the longest, Washington and Minnesota, are among the safest. Coincidence? I think not.
  • I have driven across North Dakota and Montana and Idaho. Those bloody dark colors do not lie, although they and Wyoming are also among the more thinly populated states.
  • What’s going on in the deep South? Those are places I’ve rarely visited, again suggesting the importance of my talismanic presence.
  • Of course, everyone in Europe must be better drivers than most Americans. Or, possibly, they are sensible and don’t drive as much.
  • I am intrigued by the mysterious vast empty space in the North Sea. Is it possible that a hidden land mass lurks somewhere in the open ocean there?
  • Avoid Wyoming at all costs.

Ancient Romans were diverse? Who would have thought it?

I wouldn’t have guessed that they’d ever get DNA from the dead of Pompeii, but they have. It’s not complete — heat isn’t compatible with DNA preservation — but they were able to make some mundane conclusions.

The man’s genome assembly had just 0.42x coverage, indicating that the reads had little overlap, and there were gaps. Still, according to Scorrano, the sequence was good enough to analyze certain aspects of the DNA. The results suggested the Pompeian man was genetically similar to modern Mediterranean populations and, when compared to other published genomes from ancient Rome, that he was closely related “to Imperial Roman Age individuals,” Scorrano says, adding that that’s what the team expected to find. But at the same time, he notes that Rome was packed with people from diverse genetic backgrounds back then. In fact, the markers of the man’s maternal and paternal lineages were absent among those previously published sequences, which suggests the region had high genetic diversity during that time.

The Italian Peninsula was “incredibly heterogeneous” when Vesuvius erupted—people were “coming from all over the empire” into Rome or into port cities like Pompeii, says University of Chicago archaeologist Hannah Moots, who did not participate in the study but has previously characterized the genomic pool of ancient Rome. It is exciting to have genomes from Italian regions outside Rome, she says, adding that looking at sites like Pompeii is “really interesting” because they can provide insights into more rural areas.

Mundane isn’t bad — it’s what was expected. And they did find some novel markers. Just learning that Roman society was diverse is a good reminder to all those people who think monocultures are superior.