Don’t watch this video by Christian fanatic Matt Powell. He’s trying to be “funny”, so he made a “prank” video. The “prank” was walking into various fast food places wearing headphones and shouting his order loudly. Then taking the headphones off and speaking normally.
That’s it. That’s all it is.
And then the comments! People are praising him for his brilliant work. Reading those brought home the fact that I’ll never ever understand the fundagelical brain. They’re totally alien.
This afternoon, the FtB gang is getting together to chat!
Oy, I am currently 100% caught up in my grading, have my lecture for Monday all lined up, and was looking forward to a pleasant weekend with no obligations for a change.
Then I get an email reminding me that my yearly performance review is on Monday.
Can I just go in and say I’m very, very tired and am counting the seconds to the end of the semester? How about if I just walk into the chair’s office and curl up on the floor sobbing? I’m hoping that’s adequate preparation. Just once this term I’d like to have a quiet day off, and I worked hard to get everything cleared away. I even scrubbed and autoclaved all the fly bottles! And put them away! I ought to be given a pass on this review just for that.
Last year, NASA launched an elite team of baby squid into space in a scientific experiment on the development of symbiotic interactions. These brave innocents went forth to advance our scientific understanding.
Yet now their fate is unclear. The summary of the experiment is now sprinkled with statements that “Data is either unavailable, restricted, or under review.” I need to know what happened. Perhaps, under conditions of weightlessness and intense radiation, the cephalopods quickly grew to monstrous size, melded with the computer equipment on board, and have been mimicking human communications ever since, and all the resupply missions since have been redirected to the goal of feeding the giant space squid colony? It could have happened.
Sorry, astronauts. You’ve all been squid chow for the past year.
Wait no more. The band has released a single in support of a fundraiser for Ukraine.
Here is the official video for ‘Hey Hey Rise Up’, Pink Floyd’s new Ukraine fundraiser feat Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox. Stream / download from midnight at http://pinkfloyd.lnk.to/HeyHeyRiseUp
‘Hey Hey Rise Up’, released in support of the people of Ukraine, sees David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined by long time Pink Floyd bass player Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards, all accompanying an extraordinary vocal by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox. All proceeds go to Ukrainian Humanitarian Relief.
The track uses Andriy’s vocals taken from his Instagram post of him in Kyiv’s Sofiyskaya Square singing ‘Oh, The Red Viburnum In The Meadow’, a rousing Ukrainian folk protest song written during the first world war. The title of the Pink Floyd track is taken from the last line of the song which translates as ‘Hey, hey, rise up and rejoice’.
The video for ‘Hey Hey Rise Up’ was filmed by acclaimed director Mat Whitecross and shot on the same day as the track was recorded, with Andriy singing on the screen while the band played.
Gilmour, who has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren says: “We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world’s major powers”.
Speaking about his hopes for the track Gilmour says, “I hope it will receive wide support and publicity. We want to raise funds and morale. We want to show our support for Ukraine and in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become.
The artwork for the track features a painting of the national flower of Ukraine, the sunflower, by the Cuban artist, Yosan Leon. The cover of the single is a direct reference to the woman who was seen around the world giving sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers and telling them to carry them in their pockets so that when they die, sunflowers will grow.
But hang on! That’s the band, which had an acrimonious split from their front man many years ago. What is Roger Waters saying? He has posted a letter from a Ukrainian girl, with his response, and it doesn’t surprise me at all. Waters is a radical pacifist who detests the “gangster” (he uses that word a lot) governments of Russia and the US, and idealistically wants the war to just stop and be resolved diplomatically.
I am not that optimistic.
It’s something, I guess.
The United Nations General Assembly on Thursday suspended Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council over reports of “gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights” by invading Russian troops in Ukraine.
It’s a token response to this (warning: grisly photos), but yeah, it’s something.
But the scale of the killings and the depravity with which they were committed are only just becoming apparent as police, local officials and regular citizens start the grim task of clearing Bucha of the hundreds of corpses decomposing on streets and in parks, apartment buildings and other locations.
As a team from the district prosecutor’s office moved slowly through Bucha on Wednesday, investigators uncovered evidence of torture before death, beheading and dismemberment, and the intentional burning of corpses.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what else we can do, short of escalating the war.
When my granddaughter lived in Colorado, there was a sprawling prairie dog colony just a few blocks away, and we’d take walks there. The prairie dogs were very attentive, and would react with a chorus of continuous yips and squeaks as we strolled through their neighborhood. Little did we know, they were having a conversation about us.
Con Slobodchikoff, PhD, has been studying prairie dogs for over 30 years. His studies have focused primarily on Gunnison’s prairie dogs, whose natural habitat is just outside the doors of Northern Arizona University, where Slobodchikoff is a professor emeritus.
After first observing how a colony of prairie dogs reacted to the presence of predators, he discovered that they didn’t just give the same alarm call each time – it sounded different depending on what type of predator the prairie dogs saw.
But that wasn’t the full extent of the calls’ complexity. Slobodchikoff also noticed that even though the calls signaling a certain type of predator would follow a distinct pattern, they contained small nuances that varied with each individual predator of that type.
For instance, the prairie dogs had a similar call for all coyotes, but there were subtle differences for each different coyote. Based on this observation, Slobodchikoff had a sudden insight: “What if they’re describing the physical features of each predator?”
A bit of experimentation soon proved his suspicions. After putting dogs, humans, and simple shape cutouts of all different forms, sizes, and colors within sight of the prairie dogs, analysis of the prairie dog calls revealed that the unassuming squeaks of alarm were rich with information.
“They’re able to describe the colour of clothes the humans are wearing, they’re able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun… In one 10th of a second, they say ‘Tall thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony.’”
I don’t want to know what those dogs were saying about me, but they better have been making flattering comments about Iliana. “Small cute human toddler, awwwww.”
Mano Singham has a few thoughts on the Intelligent Design creationism movement.
ID seems to have disappeared from view. One no longer hears from its most prominent advocates. There is not doubt that the 2005 Dover trial where the judge ruled that ID was essentially a religious belief structure and thus had no place in public school science curricula was a serious blow, exposing their entire stealth strategy of pretending that there was no underlying religious basis for their beliefs. In my 2009 book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that was a historical review of the fights against evolution from the Scopes trial in 1925 up to the Dover trial, I said that it looked like ID had run out of steam and had nothing more to offer, something that one of their leading theories, the late Philip Johnson, agreed with.
During the period when I was engaged with ID, I was invited by them to many debates and panel discussions so I met many of the key players (Philip Johnson, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, J. P Moreland) and we had friendly exchanges. I never encountered William Dembski or David Klinghoffer though. After the Dover trial, Dembski washed his hands of the whole ID movement, especially expressing bitterness towards two religious groups whom he accused of undermining ID. One was the ‘theistic evolutionists’ (people who believe that evolution and belief in a god can be reconciled) who he said attacked ID because they felt that it was bad science and bad religion. The other was Young-Earth Creationists whom he accused of turning against ID when they realized that ID was not going to serve as a stalking horse for their literal interpretation of the biblical Genesis story of creation.
The tension between the intellectual approach taken by the ID movement and the YEC group was always apparent to those following the issue. When I spoke at ID-sponsored debates, it was quite something to see the people on the panel talk in sophisticated terms about science and religion and then later mingle with the audience and discover that they were biblical literalists to the core, right down to Adam and Eve, the serpent, heaven and hell. With one or two exceptions, they were nice to me even though they knew that I was not at all sympathetic to their ideas. They seemed to feel sorry for me that I would eventually be stewing in hell.
He’s right, you know. ID hasn’t literally disappeared, but it’s lost all the PR oomph it briefly held in the early 2000s — you can visit sites like Uncommon Descent and still find the zealots yammering ineffectually about it, but they’re all simply repeating the same tired pseudo-arguments over and over. When Stephen Meyer is your leading intellectual light, you’re in big trouble, because goddamn he is a tedious pompous bore with no substance to his arguments. ID is the same repetitive, ridiculous nonsense as young earth creationism, but with all the religious appeal cored out. And yes, it was exposed as a poor defense against scientific arguments in the Dover trial, and people realized it was a tissue paper shield, so why bother?
A lot of the ID proponents were motivated entirely by their religious ideology, trying desperately to hide it behind that pretentious pseudoscientific veneer. It didn’t work. Everyone saw right through it.
Nowadays, look where the money is going to see who won the ID vs. Open Creationism battle: it’s not the Discovery Institute, which has been branching into culture war nonsense instead (hi, Chris Rufo, I see you, you lying asshole). The winner is…Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, the brain-dead religious approach that doesn’t even try to make good scientific arguments. No wonder Dembski is pissed off at them. Kent Hovind is making cult leader money and getting attention on YouTube and that’s about it. Young Earth Literalism turned corporate is the one successful strategy the creationists have cultivated.
So what happened to ID? Science and philosophy made it irrelevant, and then the religious creationists murdered it.
Our own American version of upper class twits
After making such a big deal about Ketanji Brown Jackson’s deferral after being asked, “What is a woman?”, you’d think they’d be prepared with a good answer to the question themselves. They aren’t.
“I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) informed the audience at a GOP event after namechecking Jackson. “This is an easy answer. We’re a creation of God. We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex — we are the weaker sex — but we are our partner — we are our husband’s wife.”
That is not a workable definition. It’s actually kind of amazing that anyone in the 21st century would still believe that that old fable is literally true.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was asked by a HuffPost reporter to define woman, and replied, “Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman. Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.” When the reporter asked him whether a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman, he appeared uncertain: “Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?”
Poor slow Josh. He said it didn’t seem complicated, was immediately confronted with a complication. And didn’t know how to answer it. I wonder if there are any women in his district who will notice he just turned them all into “men”?
Some Republicans punted.
“I don’t have anything for you on that,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).
“I’m not going to indulge you,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) dodged the question three times in a row, citing her policy of not talking to reporters in Senate hallways ― even though it was Blackburn who made this an issue with Jackson in the first place.
I think there must have been some panicky emails swapped around after that so they would get their story straight, because Blackburn hurried back with an answer.
In a follow-up email to HuffPost, a spokesperson for Blackburn said her definition of a woman is “Two X chromosomes.”
Except not all women have two X chromosomes, and relatively few people have actually had their chromosomes directly examined. It’s not a good criterion, you know? You can’t claim that it’s always been obvious what men and women are, and then base that distinction on a cellular property that was completely unknown until about 120 years ago, and is completely invisible now without a microscopic examination. What were the Victorians doing, just stumbling around guessing who men and women were, bumbling about and accidentally impregnating or getting impregnated?
Here come the parrots (sorry, parrots, you don’t deserve that comparison).
In a written statement, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) offered the same definition as Blackburn: “A woman is born with two X-chromosomes.”
Of course, Ted Cruz had to bungle it.
Cruz, when asked, immediately answered that a woman is “an adult female human.”
He denied that he had recently looked it up in a dictionary.
“I just happen to speak English,” Cruz said, adding: “A Homo sapien with two X chromosomes.”
It’s Homo sapiens, you doltish imitation of a human made from a sack full of cockroaches. I’m not surprised that you would get that wrong.
Cue more circular definitions.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) shouted his definition of a woman before slipping into a Senate elevator: “An adult female of the human species.”
Define “female”.
Some people didn’t get the memo.
“I have more of a traditional view of what a woman is,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).
What is that?
“My wife.”
It’s always nice to give the Ralph Wiggums a chance to speak up.
The prize for the most confused Republican answer has to go to Lindsey Graham, though.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said a woman is simply someone who is “biologically a woman,” adding that he thinks most Americans can figure out who’s a woman and who’s a man.
“The birds and the bees stuff ― it’s been a while, but I think I remember the general gist of the differences,” Graham said. “To have a hard time answering that question is kind of odd to me.”
A woman is someone who is biologically a woman. Got it. That’s helpful. Well, except that word “biologically”, which he just threw in to sound sciencey, inadvertently revealing that he’s got no scientific understanding at all, just like Cruz.
It’s also revealing that he has forgotten the details of that “birds and the bees stuff” and just remembers “the general gist of the differences”. Is it any wonder he doesn’t have any children?
“Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said when a reporter asked him if a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman.
