So…pronouns make the man? Or woman?

If you ask fundagelical Christians about God’s sex, they are adamant that He is definitely male. It doesn’t make sense to me — to use the usual TERFy arguments, does “he” have a penis? Does “he” make small mobile gametes? Does “he” even have gametes? Is “he” a “born biological male”? How does this even work? I have to wonder if this supernatural being should even be regarded as possessing any of the characteristics of a physical person. We could ask whether he has two arms, two eyes, or ten fingers, or even needs eyes and fingers, but some Christians are obsessed with questions about whether “he” has an adequate penis. The smarter metaphysical types are content to argue that “his” masculinity is a matter of essence, not crude biological bits.

Austin Powers is an ass, so perfectly appropriate to use him to illustrate AiG.

“Smarter” is not a term often used for the rascals at Answers in Genesis, who are so committed to a superficial literalism that they believe their god created the world in precisely 6 days. Of course, to them, God is MALE. It says so in the Bible. So now they’ve published a twisty little essay justifying the fact that God is a man, baby. What this silly theology boils down to is this:

God uses male pronouns, therefore he is male. Well, that sure was easy!

The pronouns and verbs used in the Bible to describe God are always masculine, as are most of the nouns and images (Lord, King, Redeemer, Father, husband):

The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.’ (Numbers 14:18)

Our Redeemer—the Lord of hosts is his name— is the Holy One of Israel. (Isaiah 47:4)

For your husband is your Maker, whose name is the Lord of armies; and your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel, who is called the God of all the earth. (Isaiah 54:5)

Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” (Matthew 6:9)

Jesus said…I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.” (John 20:17).

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named (Ephesians 3:14–15)

he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, (1 Timothy 6:15)

Well, that’s easy. It’s probably sacrilegious to ponder the length of God’s penis, or his sperm count, or his testosterone levels, so let us respect his privacy and avoid all the discussion of genitals, or which restroom he’s allowed to use when he urinates. I hope AiG applies the same courtesy to their fellow humans.

I do have to note that the essay does briefly nod at the idea that their god’s masculinity is a metaphor, and that most scholars agree with that, but only to immediately dismiss it on the authority of someone named John C. P. Smith. AiG is not going to tolerate any weakening of the literal language of the Bible!

Some may argue that it is true that God is presented as male but that this is only metaphorical language used to describe God’s character. Even though the modern scholarly consensus seems to suggest this latter view is correct, it is by no means a unanimous view. Pastor and Old Testament scholar John C. P. Smith gives several good reasons to think this is not the case: (1) God consistently and repeatedly represents himself as male making a deliberate assertion about his nature; (2) The presentation of God as male throughout the Bible is ubiquitous and supports the notion that his maleness is a reality and not a metaphor; and (3) the term Father is not simply one metaphor among others in the Bible: it is what God in actuality is for his worshippers.

Note, of course, that god’s masculinity is entirely a product of what words he chooses to use to describe himself, which seems fair. You might wonder who John C. P. Smith is — I never heard of him, but he’s a pastor in the UK who writes articles for — you guessed it — Answers in Genesis. He’s not a guy who was privileged to peek under God’s robes.

Keep kicking the man while he’s down (he’s not down far enough yet)

Donald Trump has been kicked out of the Screen Actors Guild! Boo-hoo. You can tell it burns him, though, since he felt compelled to write back with a “you can’t fire me, I quit!” letter. It’s so pathetic and petty, just like Donald himself.

I write to you today regarding the so-called Disciplinary Committee hearing aimed at revoking my
union membership. Who cares! [You do, Donald, you do]
While I’m not familiar with your work, I’m very proud of my work on movies such as Home Alone 2,
Zoolander and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; and television shows including The Fresh Prince of
Bel-Air, Saturday Night Live, and of course, one of the most successful shows in television history,
The Apprentice – to name just a few! [He just has to pat himself on the back. His little cameos were’t that impressive]
I’ve also greatly helped the cable news television business (said to be a dying platform with not much
time left until I got involved in politics), and created thousands of jobs at networks such as MSDNC
and Fake News CNN, among many others. [He thinks that because he was such an asshole that news agencies had to report on all of his lies, he deserves credit for their work]
Which brings me to your blatant attempt at free media attention to distract from your dismal record as
a union. Your organization has done little for its members, and nothing for me – besides collecting
dues and promoting dangerous un-American policies and ideas – as evident by your massive
unemployment rates and lawsuits from celebrated actors, who even recorded a video asking, “Why
isn’t the union fighting for me?”
These, however, are policy failures. Your disciplinary failures are even more egregious.
I no longer wish to be associated with your union.
As such, this letter is to inform you of my immediate resignation from SAG-AFTRA. You have done
nothing for me.

Poor baby. Even better, though, is SAG-AFTRA’s reply, which is short and sweet.

“Thank you.”

It’s so nice to see every little cut delivered as Trump falls.

Marjorie Taylor Greene stripped of committee assignments!

Oh, get stuffed with your ludicrous “free speech” whining.

It’s not all good news, though.

The House of Representatives has voted to strip Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments, following uproar over her past incendiary comments and apparent support of violence against Democrats.

Thursday’s vote was 230-199, with 11 Republicans joining with all Democrats to back the resolution.

Almost 200 Republicans refused to condemn her remarks, and thought it was just fine to have a treasonous conspiracy theorist serving their agenda. This was just a vote to kick her off the budget and education committees, not to repudiate her and kick her out of congress, as she deserves.

I’d like to see Cruz and Hawley booted off their committees, but I predict nothing will be done there.

The Republican party really must be destroyed.

My sister-in-law, Julie Lynn Myers

She was an awesomely nice person.

Obituary
Loving wife, mother, sister, and friend Julie Lynn (Bjornsson) Myers passed away Friday, January 29, 2021 at her home in Hoquiam, WA, she was 59 years old. Julie was born August 31, 1961 to Dwight and Shirley Bjornsson in Ballard, WA
Growing up Julie lived most of her life in Ballard but also spent some time in Tacoma, WA. She graduated from high school then went on to continue her education at University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University earning her master’s degree. After earning her degree Julie held many jobs in the health care field as a project manager.
Later in life Julie met the love of her life James Myers and they later married, and both moved to Hoquiam in July 2015. Julie was an incredibly involved member of the Peace Corp in Samoa as well as the Pierce County Democrats and would faithfully attend services at the Ocean Shores Lutheran Church. She also has many hobbies such as traveling, hiking, sewing, and volunteering at the North Beach Paws.
Julie is survived by her husband James Myers of Hoquiam, WA; stepsons Charlie Myers of Bellingham, WA and Evan Myers of Rogers, AR; stepdaughter Rachael Hahn of McCleary, WA; brother Doug Bjornsson of Tacoma, WA; sister Margo Bjornsson of Ballard, WA; as well as her grandson Alexander Hahn. She is preceded in death by her parents Dwight and Shirley Bjornsson. All who knew Julie loved her and enjoyed her company.
Arrangements are entrusted to Harrison Family Mortuary of Aberdeen. To share memories or to sign the online guestbook please visit www.harrisonfamilymortuary.com.

The lab look

I’ve been in lab all afternoon, this section finished up ten minutes early. So in case you’ve wondered, this is how I face my students nowadays.

It’s kind of offputting, but then, the students are all wearing masks, too.

Please, can we end the pandemic soon? I don’t much care for trying to teach while looking like a mysterious spaceman.

Shut up, Jordan Peterson

Can he just go away now? He’s in the news again because the Sunday Times has published an interview with him…which I haven’t read since it’s behind a paywall, but here’s the teaser:

Ithought this was going to be a normal interview with Jordan Peterson. After speaking with him at length, and with his daughter for even longer, I no longer have any idea what it is. I don’t know if this is a story about drug dependency, or doctors, or Peterson family dynamics — or a parable about toxic masculinity. Whatever else it is, it’s very strange.

It sounds like it’s an accurate description of how weird the Peterson family is, but obviously, Peterson disagrees and thinks the published interview grossly distorts the truth. I don’t know, not having read it; maybe it’s horribly biased, maybe it mangles the whole story, I just don’t care, but I can appreciate that Peterson would want to correct the record, if so. So Peterson chose to release the complete transcript of the interview.

If he thinks that makes him look normal, oh man, the Times article must be a rip-roaring phantasmagoria of bizarreness, because yikes, the transcript is freaky. His daughter, Mikhaila, is very much an enabler of his delusions. For instance, he really goes on and on about his diet obsessions.

Jordan 16:15
When I talked to Sam Harris- it’s very complicated, and I’m still trying to piece all of this together, but I had gone to see my family, my extended family on my wife’s side, and Mikhaila and her husband, and me, both- all of us came down with the same symptom set that lasted about three weeks, and it was absolutely terrible. I couldn’t get up without fainting. I’d faint, fall to the floor, gray out, not blackout completely, but gray out every time I got up. I couldn’t get warm. I was wearing multiple layers of clothes and multiple layers of blankets, and I couldn’t get warm. I had an overwhelming sense of doom and anxiety, and I didn’t want to move, and plus I couldn’t sleep for days and days. I don’t- I was without sleep for many weeks. And you know-

Interviewer 17:17
And this was from inadvertently ingesting apple cider?

Jordan 17:22
Look, that’s- that’s-

Mikhaila 17:24
It wasn’t. No. Hold on.

Jordan 17:26
There were, no doubt, multiple-

Mikhaila 17:28
Hold up. It wasn’t apple cider. It was sodium metabisulfite in apple cider. Like the alcoholic apple cider was added to a stew.

Interviewer 17:40
Understood.

Mikhaila 17:40
So it was sodium metabisulfite in that apple cider, but it wasn’t apple cider.

He was sick. He had problems. I can’t deny that. But the idea that one sip of sodium metabisulfite sent his life spiraling into catastrophe is unlikely.

Apparently he was a total wreck, but he was swiftly cured by his all-meat diet. This guy sounds exactly like one of those gullible tools promoting snake oil.

Jordan 22:09
Yes. And the diet did a lot of different things, had a lot of different effects on me. One of the most market effects immediately was that I stopped snoring, and that happened within a week. It was very, very surprising to me. And then I had psoriasis and that cleared up, and I had gum disease, and that cleared up which is- that’s not curable, gum disease, so it’s treatable, but not curable, but it’s completely cleared up. And I lost 70 pounds over about a seven month period. So the transformation was remarkable. And I’ve had other autoimmune symptoms in my life. I had alopecia areata at one point and thought I was going to lose all my hair, but luckily that stopped. And I had this condition called peripheral uveitis, which is an inflammation in the tissue of the eye, and markers on my fingernails for autoimmune- like an autoimmune condition, your body attacks its own cells, and I had markers for that as well. And I have had a lengthy history of mouth ulcers…

I suspect the Times committed the unforgivable crime of editing his words and trying to make the Peterson family interesting, because oh my god, it was the most boring thing ever. It’s an old man whining about his multitude of illnesses, with his quack of a daughter chiming in now and then with comments about how she, lacking all medical training, had diagnosed him and cured him with her magic diet. It’s stultifyingly stupid and uninteresting and morbidly bizarre. He does talk at one point about how the political left and right are exactly the same, and that what’s ripping the US apart is the feedback that keeps them swinging madly back and forth…I just wanted to yell “PROJECTION!” at the screen, because there is clearly some kind of pathological hypochondriac dynamic going on in his family that is pushing him back and forth.

But mainly, it’s agonizingly boring. I imagine the reporter struggled to extract anything at all interesting from it. Apparently, the Times reported that he’s a schizophrenic weirdo, to which Mikhaila just says nah, he was akathisic (akathisia is mentioned 91 times in the interview!) — but no one is going to confuse akathesia with schozophrenia, except maybe that colossal ignoramus, Mikhaila. All I can think is…

Shut up, Jordan Peterson, you meandering mumbling old git.

Lewis Wolpert has died

This is sad — Wolpert was one of my favorite developmental biologists. Years ago I wrestled with my choice of developmental textbook, between Scott Gilbert’s Developmental Biology, which is very very good, and Wolpert’s Principles of Development, which I eventually decided was a better fit to how I taught the course. I also appreciated his work on positional information and patterning. And now he has died at the age of 91, and only now do I find out that he lived an interesting life.

He studied civil engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he became involved in progressive politics, helping to distribute communist literature in the townships; in 1952 he met Nelson Mandela. After two years working on soil mechanics as assistant to the director of the Building Research Institute in Pretoria, he hitchhiked to Europe, working briefly for the water planning board in Israel before studying soil mechanics at Imperial College London.

His life was changed when a friend in South Africa wrote to suggest he apply his knowledge of mechanics to the study of dividing cells. The biophysicist James Danielli at King’s College London accepted him as a PhD student, and with a Swedish colleague, Trygve Gustafson, he went on to measure the mechanical forces involved in cell division. He was promoted to lecturer and reader (in zoology) at King’s before taking up the chair of biology as applied to medicine at the Middlesex (transferred to University College London after the two institutions merged), where he remained until he retired aged 74.

He was also a great popularizer with a radio show discussing science in the UK, which I’ve had difficulty finding here — he does have a debate with William Lane Craig on YouTube, which I’ve avoided ever watching, because I can’t stand that sanctimonious Christian liar. Wolpert also has some things I disagree with, such as his gender essentialist leanings, a common problem with older developmental biologists steeped in model systems and lacking exposure to population thinking.

It wasn’t all an upward ascent for him. He suffered from a crippling depression.

The marriage to Elizabeth ended in divorce, and in 1993 Wolpert married the Australian writer Jill Neville. It was when his working and home lives were at their most secure and harmonious that a suicidal episode led to him spending three weeks in hospital. He recovered after treatment with antidepressants and cognitive behavioural therapy. Jill died suddenly of cancer in 1997.

Lately I’ve come to appreciate how devastating depression can be. And cancer sucks.

Do the COVIDiots even understand actuarial statistics?

Because I find this rather convincing that COVID-19 is much more than “just a flu”.

The Minnesota numbers are in, and they don’t look good.

Minnesota suffered more than 50,000 deaths in a year for the first time in recorded state history in 2020, mostly because of COVID-19 but also due to rising drug abuse and worsening racial health disparities.

A 15% increase in mortality from 2019 to 2020 demonstrates that the pandemic actually caused more deaths in Minnesota and wasn’t just a substitute cause for people who were likely to die anyway.

Hey, can we simplify that and just call all the deaths due to the neglected pandemic response, the erosion of our social safety net, and racism the Republican death toll?

Could MegaFarmCorps do good for the land?

Every Fall, as I travel around, I’m mystified by all the freshly harvested fields, black with exposed soil, and I wonder…isn’t that a bad idea? Isn’t that nice rich dirt going to wash away when the snow melts and the spring rains arrive? But what do I know? I’m not a farmer. I never studied agriculture, so I’m just going to trust the experts whose livelihood depends on their land.

Of course, my confidence tends to be eroded by all the Trump signs on those fields.

But good news! For once, the giant food corporations are trying to do something for the environment. They’re giving farmers incentives to practice something called regenerative agriculture.

Still, the companies’ moves have the potential to expand the use of unconventional farming practices known as regenerative agriculture. The movement represents a fundamental change to the way mainstream farmers manage their fields.

Regenerative principles call for reducing or even eliminating such mainstays of farming as tilling the soil before sowing seeds. Other regenerative techniques include planting cover crops, so soil is never bare; expanding plant diversity; adding livestock to an operation; and reducing or eliminating the use of chemicals.

The system has benefits such as storing more climate-altering carbon in the soil, improving water quality by preventing runoff, and reducing the need for pesticides by increasing insect biodiversity. Research shows it can also make farms more profitable by reducing the cost of chemicals and fertilizer and spreading price risk among many crops instead of just corn and soybeans.

“It’s not just about carbon. It’s not just a water benefit,” Sirolli said. “You get all of these different benefits that you stack together that benefit the community, that benefit the planet, while at the same time making sense for the farmer.”

See? I am learning something about farming. Although to be fair, if I’d been asked, I would have made suggestions along those same lines, although having to be admittedly vague about how to implement them.

I was probably thinking selfishly, though. Fewer pesticides → more plant and insect diversity → MORE SPIDERS. Also all those agricultural pollutants are just bad for us.

Overall, the Minnesota River is unhealthy. Sediment clouds the water, phosphorus causes algae, nitrogen poses risks to humans and fish, and bacteria make the water unsafe for swimming.

There are going to be so many wild books out of the last administration

Wow. You just have to read this account of a last ditch desperate meeting in the White House.

Four conspiracy theorists marched into the Oval Office. It was early evening on Friday, Dec. 18 — more than a month after the election had been declared for Joe Biden, and four days after the Electoral College met in every state to make it official.

“How the hell did Sidney get in the building?” White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann grumbled from the outer Oval Office as Sidney Powell and her entourage strutted by to visit the president.

President Trump’s private schedule hadn’t included appointments for Powell or the others: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and a little-known former Trump administration official, Emily Newman. But they’d come to convince Trump that he had the power to take extreme measures to keep fighting.

That’s the beginning. That’s the sane part. Then the screaming begins.

Oh, and Giuliani shows up. And it goes on for about 6 hours until midnight.

It was remarkable that the presidency had deteriorated to such an extent that this fight in the Oval Office between senior White House officials and radical conspiracists was even taking place.

Yeesh, and I still see fanatics defending the Trumpkins.