I explain my concept of atheism. A lot of people are going to hate it.
Transcript below the fold.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I explain my concept of atheism. A lot of people are going to hate it.
Transcript below the fold.
I decided to blow off the work for the night and go to the movies. But now that the local theater coop has put in a second screen I’ve had to make decisions every time I go. Two choices! Oh boy!
The first option was The Eternals, the latest Marvel franchise entry. It’s another mob of superheroes, with immortality added on top of the ability to fly, to punch really hard, to shoot lasers out of their eyes*. That did not appeal. I did not go. I will predict that the ending of that movie is going to be another CGI slam-fest. Plus it’s another example of dredging the bottom of the IP barrel to come up with an obscure comic book that they can pump up into a big blockbuster. I hope it bombs.
The alternative was Lamb. Yes! That looked weird and surreal, and it was.
The story: Ingvar and Maria are an Icelandic couple (the whole movie is in Icelandic, with subtitles) who run a remote sheep farm. It’s beautiful, even though much of it is shot in a gray fog and mist, with the Icelandic scenery peeking through. It’s lambing time! They deliver several normal lambs, and then one brings them up short — we don’t see the lamb for quite some time, but for some reason Ingvar and Maria are enchanted by her, naming her Ada and bringing her into the house to raise her as their child. A good part of the surreal nature of this movie is how the couple are perfectly comfortable with, and even loving as their own child, a baby who has the head of a sheep and the body of a human child, as is eventually revealed. There’s something about Ada that makes people fall in love with her. I’ll say no more, except that the movie culminates in a bloody revelation.
I entirely enjoyed it. No punching. One semi-magical mystery. Good acting. People who were human and interesting in an extraordinarily unusual situation. Also, less than two hours long, while The Eternals goes on for 2½ hours, and another prediction: I bet it ends with a teaser to persuade you to watch the next movie in the franchise.
Go see it. Send a message that we want more unique movies, rather than more of the same ol’ same ol’. I think most people would enjoy it.
*No. Just no. Eyes don’t work that way. I hate it, it’s one of the worst conventions** of these kinds of movies.
**The worst is how “mutations” are handled. Somehow, single point mutations, or maybe insertions/deletions, are powerful enough to induce metaphysical powers that break all the laws of thermodynamics? I can’t accept it. Flies, mice, and cockroaches have comparable physiology and genetics to ours, so why aren’t there one-in-a-billion Drosophila variants buzzing around zapping everything with laser beams? Why aren’t there mice levitating? Why no rare cockroaches punching through walls with their super-strength? It’s all nonsense***.
***Nonsense is OK in the movies. The problem is when it overwhelms the human story. I enjoy Spider-Man or Captain America**** because of the themes of responsibility and sacrifice that I can relate to.
****But not Batman or Iron Man. They’re just rich assholes.
Uh-oh. Apparently, I’ve been storing Satan in my freezer.
Conservative cable network Newsmax has sidelined White House correspondent Emerald Robinson after she made the utterly bonkers claim that COVID-19 vaccines contain a “bioluminescent” tracker linked to the Devil.
In a post that has since been taken down by Twitter for peddling COVID-19 misinformation, Robinson warned “Christians” that the vaccines include “a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,” all while suggesting to her followers that the shot was the “Mark of the Beast”—something she’s said before.
What do you know…someone who is just too batty for Newsmax.
A little more information:
Luciferase is an enzyme that reacts with a couple of common substrates to make light. If you want to make cells glow, you inject them with it, or in many cases you insert the luciferase DNA into the genome, and you get a cell that produces light, which is handy…if you are tracking its expression in a microscope.
I’ve also got some Lucifer Yellow in my freezer. This is not an enzyme — the compound actually glows bright yellow under fluorescent light. Likewise, I’ve used it for looking at cells, not people.
Do you even know how much this stuff costs? Last time I bought it, LY was about $600 for a vial containing 100mg. You’re not going to throw it into a dose of vaccines.
I have several other dyes in my freezer. 1,1′-Dioctadecyl-3,3,3′,3′-Tetramethylindocarbocyanine Perchlorate (DiI, for short) is a favorite, but who knows, it might be the name of some other Lord of Hell.
This little curly-legged fella, that’s who.
Come to think of it, neither do spiders. I guess if you have that many limbs, you want to minimize points of failure.
I got out of bed this morning looking forward to my visit to the doctor. My tendinitis pain has been greatly reduced, I’m able to walk without any pain at all, and I expected to be told I can finally get rid of The F$#*!ing Boot. But no, it was not to be. There’s still some residual inflammation — touching the back of my heel hurts something fierce — so the doctor wants to clear out that last little pocket of trouble.
Two more weeks of The Boot. Plus a 5-day pulse of prednisone. It’s the opposite of what I wanted to hear.
To give me something to look forward to, at the end of those two weeks they’ll reassess, and if the tendon hasn’t calmed down, it’ll be time to look into surgery. The way things are going, I’m just going to assume it’s going to go badly and that I’ll get to celebrate Xmas break by going under the knife.
Damn. Well, I needed to be trapped at my desk to do a lot of grading, anyway.
Creationists have been doing this for as long as I’ve been alive, and now it’s the mainstream modus operandi.
I wish I could just laugh off this demented buffoon, Madison Cawthorn.
When I see the people that are in Washington, DC who are trying to insert their woke politics into our culture, trying to destroy western civilization, trying to take all of our morality away from everyone, trying to make everyone genderless, sexless, and Godless.
No one on the liberal/progressive side wants to destroy western civilization. We want to make our culture stronger, more humane, and more egalitarian. If you consider that an act of destruction, you have a warped vision of what society should be.
No one is trying to take away everyone’s morality. Morality is a good thing. We would like to diminish the kind of immorality that allows people to kneel on other people’s necks until they are dead.
Hey, remember when the conservative complaint was that we were licentious proponents of free love? I guess that wasn’t really their concern. Now their complaints have gone the other way, accusing us of making everyone genderless and sexless. No one wants to do that, although we would say that if you don’t want to have sex, you shouldn’t have to.
It’s true that I would like to see everyone godless, but I also know that you can’t force atheism on anyone. It’s a free choice, and that’s all we ask, is that everyone have liberty of conscience.
Madison Cawthorn is a ridiculous mad far-right looney-tune who has to invent absurd accusations to stir up hatred. His comments about what “people” in Washington, DC are doing are stupid and false, but his next words ought to concern everyone.
We want our country back, we want our culture back, and if you want to stand in the way that, we will run you over.
“run you over”–that would also be a misrepresentation of his own side in the culture wars, if it weren’t for the fact that right-wingers have been doing exactly that, and Republican lawmakers are working hard to make it legal to kill protesters with cars.
Ari Weil, a researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, counted six states that considered laws shielding drivers who attack protesters in 2017, but most of those “hit and kill” bills (as the ACLU refers to them) went nowhere. It took a few more years for the right-wing propaganda apparatus to fully numb conservative consciences, and prepare them to openly endorse an idea as plainly depraved as this one. In the meantime, the car attacks kept coming: In 2020, Weil tracked “72 incidents of cars driving into protesters across 52 different cities,” over the span of just over a month. The online far right memed about running over demonstrators regularly, and cops openly encouraged it in social media comments. Cops also, in cities such as New York and Detroit, participated in the practice themselves. In Boston last year, Police Sergeant Clifton McHale was recorded on a police body camera bragging about hitting demonstrators with a police cruiser. He was placed on administrative leave when that footage was surfaced by reporter Eoin Higgins. He is now, Higgins reports, back on desk duty.*
Now lawmakers seem to have overcome whatever reticence they may once have felt about formally endorsing automobile attacks. Five states besides Florida introduced similar bills this year, granting some form of immunity to people running into demonstrators. The Iowa measure passed the state House and awaits Senate approval. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt just signed another version into law in his state. This one shields attacking drivers from criminal liability.
That last bit from Cawthorn is openly an incitement to violence. He will not face any legal difficulties for telling his constituents to murder unspecified people they don’t like with their cars. And shouldn’t he be in prison for inciting an insurrection already?
Teaching is a whole new world nowadays. I faced three different problems today.
One of our sports teams has been exposed to COVID-19, and they’ve been quarantined and can’t come to class.
Solution: I’ll be recording my lectures for a while and passing them on to the affected students. Also, we’ve been working through some genetics problems, so I’m forwarding those for them to work on in their isolation chambers.
A student had a serious family crisis and had to miss the last exam, and is panicking over it.
Solution: For them, I’ll pretend that exam never happened, and their final grade will be based on the average of four exams, rather than five, like the rest of the class. The exams are cumulative so it’s not like they won’t be evaluated on part of the class.
One of my international students has been abruptly drafted into the military service for a certain Eurasian country, and is flying away from the US prematurely.
Wooo. I wouldn’t want to be in that situation. Solution: I am arranging to email them a take-home final exam so they can get credit for the course, and I hope come back to finish up their degree.
I’m thinking now that I actually have it pretty easy. My job is to make everything as smooth and doable for the students who don’t have it so easy.
All we have to do next is end the pandemic, all other health problems, and end war, and teaching will get easier.
The most evil calendar would be one where every day is Thursday.
I made the mistake of looking at my calendar for the day.
Doom, doom, doom, doom.
Every gap in my schedule is filled with appointments. I’m about to go in, won’t emerge into the light of day again until sometime after 6.
This silly little Halloween commercial for Twix candy has the creationists coughing up all kinds of bizarre ahistorical nonsense. It features a goth nanny with witchy powers who is non-judgementally taking care of a little boy who is wearing a princess dress. The non-judgmental bit is clearly anathema to fundamentalist Christians.
Answers in Genesis discusses it in their weekly “news” show. I learned many things from this segment. You don’t need to watch it, I’ve transcribed the relevant bits, but if you must, the bullshit is flowing at around the 8 minute mark.
Patricia: It’s pretty incredible the messages it is promoting. One of the things I noticed is that actually if you take that narrative that is happening it basically summarizes the key principles behind Marxism. So that whole idea is that you have this minority that is being oppressed so then the solution to that, to make everyone live happily ever after, is to violently overthrow the oppressor, commit some kind of revolution, forcibly remove them, and then everything is good. And that’s actually what you are seeing in this commercial. So that’s an interesting connection to Marxism there.
Tim: And that’s what we see historically with Marxism. Every time there’s a revolution, everything is perfect afterwards and nothing ever goes wrong. It’s utopia.
Patricia: That’s the idea, but it’s not going to work in a sinful world.
Tim: And it never has worked.
It is November, which puts us about four months after the Fourth of July, so I guess we just pinned down a measure of how far back into the past a creationist’s mind can reach. About 4 months. Which explains a lot about the whole young earth notion, I guess.
It’s a bit of a reach to call it Marxism, though. So the key principle of Marxism is for oppressed minorities to have a revolution, period? I’m no expert on Marx or communism, but I’m sure there’s slightly more to it than that. By that definition, the United States is Marxist.
Oh, but she’s not done. It’s also the key principle of Wicca, which is the same as Marxism, a connection I’d never seen made before.
Patricia: She’s teaching him the main principle of Wicca, it’s called the Wiccan rede, it says “an ye harm no one, do what you will”. So throughout this video she’s encouraging him to wear this dress because he wants to. You know, that sounds OK because you’re not harming someone, but actually civilizations have tried that in the past. One civilization that tried it said that “liberty consists of the freedom to do everything that injures no one else.” You might think that sounds pretty good, but what civilization was this? It was revolutionary France, where they tortured and guillotined thousands and thousands of people because, without God, a creator as your source for absolutes in truth and morality, you can define harm however you want, you can define human rights however you want, these were all things that were seen happening in this culture, and the commercial, unfortunately, summarizes that pretty well.
Wait wait wait…the French Revolution was run by Communist witches? I’m a little confused by the contradiction here: the Wiccan rede says “harm no one”, and according to AiG, that was the cause of a bloody revolution with guillotines lopping off heads? It seems to me that if the revolution were actually inspired by Wiccan principles, there would have been no bloodshed.
Remember: the French Revolution was an act by Marxist Wiccans.
The AiG show goes on with more instances of idiocy. They are also upset by another commercial, “Doritos made this ad for the Mexican market where a dead guy’s ghost comes back to tell his family he has a gay lover in heaven”. Yeah, it’s the Gay Agenda again. They’d don’t like it.
Curiously, almost all their sources for these stories is a crappy conservative sort-of-humor site, “Not the Bee”, which is a spinoff of the not-at-all funny Babylon Bee. That tells you something about the depth of their research. One exception is that they comment on an article from Science Daily, “DNA tangles can help predict evolution of mutations”.
In that article, the authors describe how loops or tangles in unfolded bacterial DNA can act as hotspots for mutations. It’s basic research into the mechanisms of evolution and discusses how identifying these hotspots can lead to better predictions about likely new mutations in a line of bacteria.
You can guess how deeply Ken Ham discusses this topic. “They’re still just bacteria.” Done and done.
Damn, those people are stupid. I’m sure they’re sincere in their deeply held beliefs, the problem being that their beliefs are so idiotic and ignorant.
