Whenever I feel the rage and frustrating rising, I can just contemplate Knut and Iliana and feel my blood pressure drop.
Those kids are probably going to add a few years to my life, especially since I won’t have to deal with any of the trouble they get into.
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I go into my local Snap Fitness for a little workout — no, I’m not getting buff, I’m just trying to stave off my inevitable decline into decrepitude. This is supposed to be a good experience, right? It never is, and it’s getting worse.
This morning pretty much all of the flat screens on the wall were tuned to Fucking Fox News, with nothing but Republican attack ads against state democrats (there must be a lot of toxic cash flooding the state right now). OK, I can change the channels, especially when we’re the only people there, but it does make me question whether I want to be associated with the regular clientele of this place.
Even worse, though, they pipe in horrible music from Sirius FM, curated by a trio of the worst, loudest, shrillest, most obnoxious DJs in broadcast history. I deal with this by going in with my earbuds and drowning them out with music I like, sans howling baboons shrieking about contests and trivia. It didn’t work today, because the goddamned music was turned up so loud that even Roger Waters and Joe Cocker Annie Lennox and cranked up to the max couldn’t be heard over them, and I was killing my ears trying to escape. It was intolerable and I finally had to leave.
So when I finally collapse into an even more out of shape, flabby, breathless blob of amuscular goo, I want you all to blame (or thank) Snap Fitness of Morris for driving me away.
And you wonder why I’m cranky all the time.
I skipped off to the big city yesterday (allowing a TERF to flood the comments, sorry — he has been dealt with now) to hear Jim G. Helton speak on the new directions American Atheists is going to take. Well, maybe. He’s AA’s Kentucky State Director, so I’m not sure how well his goals are shared with the national leadership, but I like his plan. I left hoping his ideas would be translated into real action, but at the same time, “hope” is an unfamiliar emotion when dealing with organized atheism, and I’ve been disappointed more than a few times.
Here’s the gist of his talk. He put up a slide of “Atheist Issues”, the stuff we’re all familiar with and that has nearly 100% support from atheist organizations.
If you’re like me, you recognize these as standard separation of church and state concerns, and maybe, if you’re like me, you automatically assume that the government should not be promoting sectarian religious views. This is kind of a core set of ideas for atheism in general, but it’s often stuff that has to be handled by lawyers. It’s good to have lawyers on your side, but it’s not really stuff I can get directly involved in, other than donating money to pay lawyers and making pissed-off comments.
And then he asked, “Are these atheist issues?”
He asked this of possibly the most sympathetic audience he could find: Minnesota Atheists are so socially justicey at all times for all of history that the entire membership enthusiastically agreed that all of those were important atheist issues. I certainly think they are, and have been saying so for over a decade (not that anyone listens).
Then he gave his rationale for why all these issues ought to be on the agenda of an atheist organization. When you get down to it, most of the opposition to all of them is religiously motivated — if religion vanished tomorrow, so would creationism, and all of those Bible in the schools bills, and the opposition to all those other issues would be greatly attenuated. There’s no doubting that religion is a major contributor to the world of bad ideas plaguing us.
I like the direction he’s going, but I fear he’s too optimistic. I know that if I could snap my fingers in a kind of atheist Thanos-gambit and selectively make every religious person on the planet crumble into dust (it would be far more than half, I’m afraid), I’m confident that all the items on his first list would immediately disappear as well. Poof, easy.
But the items on the second list? Not so fast. A lot of their opponents would vanish, as would much of their financial base, but unfortunately, there are a lot of fanatical atheists who oppose LGBT and women’s rights, for instance. Those TERFs that have been making bad, incoherent arguments against transgender rights here on the blog in the last few weeks…near as I can tell, they’ve all been skeptics and atheists. Go browse the atheist channels on YouTube, and you’ll find a sordid mass of knee-jerk misogynists thriving there. The alt-right is full of people whose racists beliefs rest on a religious conviction that they are objectively, factually, scientifically correct. Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins just declared at CSICON that the people who support those issues are extremists who belong to the regressive left.
The space between the two lists above is precisely where the fault line that has created the Deep Rifts in the atheist movement lies. You can’t just claim that the division is between the religious and the non-religious, because there is no shortage of atheists who will fight tooth and nail against all the issues on the second list. These aren’t purely atheist issues, even if Jim Helton and Minnesota Atheists and PZ Myers are consistently aligned in favor of them. If and when American Atheists adopts that list as an important component of their organization’s activism, there will be howls of protest.
Are they prepared for that? I don’t know. Helton’s personal enthusiasm is great, but I have my cynical, pessimistic doubts.
I asked one question and didn’t get a solid answer. American Atheist’s national convention is in April in Cincinnati, Helton’s own backyard. For years I’ve seen them chase the elusive celebrity atheist to headline their events, often without regard for their other views. I can sympathize with why they do it — a celebrity headliner is great for improving attendance. But are they going to continue to lust after the kind of celebrity atheist who labels people who promote the items in that second list as “extremists” and the “regressive left”? He skirted the question, because speakers for that event haven’t been lined up yet.
I fear, though, that the planners for that conference would be eager to sign up one of the usual Big Name Atheists — a Dawkins or a Harris, for instance, or a Stephen Fry — and would commit to them in a flash, no matter that their views often contradict the values in that hopeful list. The problem is that the celebrity atheists all turn out to be such assholes.
One glimmer of hope: part of his proposed strategy is to make deeper alliances with organization like Planned Parenthood or the LGBTQ community, in part because they’re a new member pool, but also because there are smart, talented people among them who could be great speakers at atheist events. I think that’s an important idea, not the least because a lot of those people would be alienated by the kinds of racist, misogynistic ideas that way too many atheist big shots like to endorse, and maybe atheist organizations would stop drooling at the idea of bringing in yet another popular cis-het white man who wants to pander to nothing but their fellow cis-het white men.
My tentative take-away from the talk: I like the direction he’s going, hope he succeeds, but am afraid he’s a little naive about the forces within atheism that are going to make life difficult for him. I can already predict all the complaints he’s going to get, because I’ve been getting them for years.
The Trump administration would like to pretend that global climate change is not real, defying the evidence of an entire planet, so what’s it matter that they have merely decided to overrule biology? So let’s simplify the complexity of gender by legal fiat.
“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department [of Health and Human Services] proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”
The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.
All this nonsense is coming from Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, who wants to deny civil rights to transgender individuals. Who is Roger Severino?
Mr. Severino, while serving as the head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation,…
Holy fuck, just stop right there. Let that sink in.
…was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity, which he called “radical gender ideology.”
The opposition is building, but look…Trump has packed high offices in government with ignorant ideologues. They’re planning to steamroll all rational opposition.
Harper Jean Tobin, the policy director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group, called the maneuvering “an extremely aggressive legal position that is inconsistent with dozens of federal court decisions.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t care about court decisions — I’m more concerned that this is in defiance of human biological reality. But then the one thing we know about Republicans is that they believe they make their own reality.
I do wonder if any TERFs will stop and think and realize that siding with Trump and the religious right is a sign that they might be wrong.
Nah. There’s no silver lining to this stormcloud of stupidity. Just keep waiting for the next memo to leak, the one supporting the categorization of people into humans and subhumans on the basis of skin color or ancestry.
It’s no secret that I am greatly disillusioned with organized atheism — it usually seems to organize around the idea of the status quo minus churches, and not much else. It leaves a great big gap where ethics and equality and social justice ought to be, all in the name of not alienating the unctuous asshats…and there are a lot of those in atheism. So I’ve just stayed away, which is very depressing, because I still think the core truth that there are no gods is important.
Tomorrow, Sunday at 2:00, Minnesota Atheists (which is a good group, one of the exceptions that is strongly committed to social justice activism) is hosting Jim Helton of American Atheists, one of the big orgs that has burned us all fairly recently, and he promises that things are changing. Here’s the topic for the day:
What is an “atheist issue”? American Atheists redefines what that is. They challenge the status quo. In doing so, they lay out a plan to fight for equality and the true separation of religion and government. If you are not happy with the way things are, then the time is now to make a change.
Jim G. Helton, the National Field Organizer for American Atheists, will be visiting freethought groups in Minnesota over the course of four days in mid-October to bring us up-to-date on what American Atheists is doing, how they can help us, and how we can help them.
That’s a bit vague, but August Berkshire, who is one of the good guys, vouches for him. He is correct that I am “not happy with the way things are”, but I don’t know if he’s referring to the way atheism is, or if he’s talking generically about the rising power of evangelical Christianity. Do I really want to get my hopes up and attend? I’m thinking about it. AA has the power to change a lot, I’ve just been disappointed so many times before.
Iliana’s father is already teaching her how to read.
Saga Vanacek, the young woman who found a Viking sword in a Swedish lake, has written her story. She is commendably practical about her future plans, and has refused the offer to be Queen of Scandinavia.
This month, the archaeologists finally came to search the rest of the lake and they found a brooch that is as old as my sword, and a coin from the 18th century. Then they announced the news and I could finally tell everyone at school. I came back from gym class and the whiteboard said, “Saga’s sword” and there were balloons, and the whole class got to have ice-cream.
I had to give the sword to the local museum – Daddy explained that it’s part of history and important to share it with others. I felt “boo” that it’s gone away, but “yay” that other people will get to see it. I’m going to try to raise some money to make a replica sword that I can keep.
People on the internet are saying I am the queen of Sweden, because in the legend of King Arthur, he was given a sword by a lady in a lake, and that meant he would become king. I am not a lady – I’m only eight – but it’s true I found a sword in the lake. I wouldn’t mind being queen for a day, but when I grow up I want to be a vet. Or an actor in Paris.
Balloons and ice cream are much better than being royalty. I approve.
If you wish you could be a true master of aplomb, you should follow these lessons in how to be more Swedish.
1. Drink a lot of coffee.
Even if you think you drink a lot of coffee, double it right now and still not out-do the average Swede. We drink more coffee than anyone in the world, (except the Finns). Go for strong filter coffee.2. When you get up in the morning, follow this ritual:
2 slices of crisp bread, 1-2 boiled eggs, a squirt of Kalles creamed cod roe with your eggs. Some sliced cheese, if you are feeling fancy. Drink a large glass of milk. Coffee.
There is a lot more, of course. Much of it seems to be about coffee and food. I speak from experience: this is all true. My wife is 100% Scandinavian (I’m only 50%), and I’ve noticed that she consumes twice as much coffee as I do, and she drinks it twice as fast. Must be genetic.
Or, if you’d prefer, you can aspire to the rigors of being more Norwegian. It’s not easy, but you can look forward to looking down on Swedes. This was also true of my family — even the ones who were half-Swedish liked to tease the Swedes with 20 Swedes ran through the weeds chased by one Norwegian. They overlooked that the song mainly praises the Irish, because as we all know, Knut Rokne is a good Norwegian.
Somehow, the attitude or Norwegian superiority survives the Law of Jante, which Saga Vanacek follows without a moment’s thought.
Warning: I grew up with the Scandinavian customs of a century ago, so traveling to Norway and discovering that they’re now committing the heresy of hot dogs on their lefse was a shock. Cultures change.
By the way, you could also try to be more Finnish, but that would be weird. Only true Finns want to be more Finnish. They wouldn’t have it any other way.
Zombies, ghouls, and miscellaneous brain-dead monsters:
It’s for a homeschooling conference titled Teach Them Diligently, with the motto “Strengthen Your Family Through Biblical Homeschooling”. Would you pay money to have these jokers teach your children lies?
Hmmm. I’ve got a strong family with children who grew up to make me proud, and we never had to indoctrinate them in biblical foolishness to accomplish that. What does their audience have to be so insecure about? That maybe, unless they lie really loudly, their children will grow up to ask questions and abandon dogma? Most of us consider that to be a desirable outcome.
The latest excuse from Saudi Arabia for the death of Jamal Khashoggi is that he started it — he started a fist fight with a team of 15 professional killers, and they had to defend themselves by hacking him apart with a bonesaw. Our president* might well be willing to accept that story, but it’s out of character for Khashoggi and not compatible with the intent of Mohammed bin Salman and the ruling class of Saudi Arabia.
The murder is nothing new: the regime has been vicious and repressive for a long time, and this is just one case that has erupted into the public eye — it is actually a major error by Mohammed bin Salman, who has been trying to misrepresent himself as a progressive reformer. He’s not. He’s just another criminal thug who has been handed vast sums of money and excessive power by an archaic political system. We’ve seen all the warning signs that he was not a power for reform. Remember Raif Badawi?
The kingdom has long been an absolute monarchy that does not tolerate open dissent, but this kind of repression is new. In earlier times, Saudi rulers restricted behavior, often under severe interpretations of Islamic law, and carried out barbaric punishments. We have often called attention to the unjust treatment of blogger Raif Badawi, who was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to 1,000 lashes — 50 were delivered in a public square in Jeddah before it was stopped — and 10 years in prison for online posts that challenged the religious authorities to allow a more pluralistic and moderate practice of Islam. The system was intolerant and harsh.
The powers-that-be in Saudi Arabia have been reshaping their laws to allow themselves greater latitude to oppress.
Almost all prosecutions of political and human rights activists have been channeled through the Specialized Criminal Court, originally established in 2008 to handle terrorism cases, where defendants often do not have lawyers during the investigative phase, and pretrial detentions can be arbitrary and lengthy. In October 2017, the kingdom updated its counterterrorism law, which was already overly broad, to add a host of tripwires to criminalize free expression. For example, the definition of terrorism was extended to those who “describe” the king or crown prince “in any way offensive to religion or justice.”
Oh, great. Now I’m a terrorist, because I’m going to openly say that the king and crown prince are goddamn evil motherfuckers.
That actually felt good. I’m going to have to curse the elites of Saudia Arabian society more often.
I remember, once upon a time, feeling that maybe Saudi Arabia was making progress — like when they started allowing women to drive. I was mistaken. It seems that one good reason to allow women to drive is that it gives you an easy way to tag a female dissident.
A good example of how the environment has changed is the case of female activists who had long sought the right to drive, and to change the guardianship system, which gives men the authority to make critical decisions on behalf of their female relatives. For years, the women had carefully pushed for change while staying largely within bounds the government could accept. But the new crown prince could not tolerate their voices. He granted women the right to drive — and then punished those who had worked for that reform. In May, 11 of them were arrested. Several remain in jail, accused of serious crimes that could bring long prison sentences, including “suspicious contact with foreign parties” and undermining the “security and stability” of the state. They have been vilified in the media; a pro-government Twitter account posted images of those arrested with the word “traitor” splattered in red across their faces, Human Rights Watch reported.
Cancel that arms deal our goddamn evil motherfucker of a president is so proud of. It’s the least we can do. Unfortunately, our GEM of a president aspires to by the tyrant ruler of a pariah state, just like the Saudi king, and is going to do nothing.
Oh, look. Biochemists have found a recipe that spontaneously produces all four nucleotides used in RNA.
Carell’s story starts with only six molecular building blocks—oxygen, nitrogen, methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen cyanide, all of which would have been present on early Earth. Other research groups had shown that these molecules could react to form somewhat more complex compounds than the ones Carell used.
To make the pyrimidines, Carell started with compounds called cyanoacetylene and hydroxylamine, which react to form compounds called amino-isoxazoles. These, in turn, react with another simple molecule, urea, to form compounds that then react with a sugar called ribose to make one last set of intermediate compounds.
Finally, in the presence of sulfur-containing compounds called thiols and trace amounts of iron or nickel salts, these intermediates transform into the pyrimidines cytosine and uracil. As a bonus, this last reaction is triggered when the metals in the salts harbor extra positive charges, which is precisely what occurs in the final step in a similar molecular cascade that produces the purines, adenine and guanine. Even better, the step that leads to all four nucleotides works in one pot, Carell says, offering for the first time a plausible explanation of how all of RNA’s building blocks could have arisen side by side.
