Hyphoid Logic

Cthulhu's Bar and Grill for the Holidays

2008-12-13T14:05:00.005-05:00

Just in time for the holidays, I'm happy to announce the grand opening of Cthulhu's Bar & Grill! It's a one-stop shop for vaguely Cthulhu-related t-shirts and chachkes and such.

Nothing says winter quite like a green, octopus-headed cocktail waitress. Face it.

A Different Kind of White House in Marianna, FL

2008-12-10T13:16:00.003-05:00

When I lived in Florida, I went to a town called Marianna a few times. My most recent trip there was just this past September when I returned to the state to collect beetle specimens. Marianna has a dark past in a number of ways and is, to this day, a bit out of step with modern thinking. Every so often, something beyond distasteful bubbles out of the place. The following, a story that sounds like the backdrop for a horror movie, is one of them.

'White House Boys' win inquiry of reform school graves

By Rich Phillips

Four men, now in their 60s, met over the Internet, shared stories about the darkest days of their pasts and spurred an investigation into 32 graves at a reform school.

Roger Kiser, Michael McCarthy, Bryant Middleton and Dick Colon talked about whippings and beatings and other boys who disappeared. They discussed the 32 crosses marking the graves of persons unknown on the grounds of the former Florida Industrial School for Boys.

They called their group the White House Boys, taking the name from the single story concrete building where, they say, boys were beaten and tortured decades ago.

The White House Boys believe that delinquents and orphans sent to the concrete White House were killed and their remains buried to cover up the brutality.

This week, the four called on Florida Gov. Charlie Crist to investigate. Crist agreed and asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to search for remains, identify them and determine whether any crimes were committed.

The department agreed to look into the mystery of the 32 crosses on the grounds of what is now known as the Dozier School, in Marianna, just south of the Alabama state line...

...A guard confronted the other boy and began to treat him roughly, Middleton said.

"He dragged him to the administration building, and I never saw him again. He never came back to work or to the cottage," Middleton said. "He literally disappeared off the face of the Earth..."

Colon said he remembers entering the laundry one day, and his life has never been the same.

Inside a large tumble dryer was a black teen.

The White House boys, who are all white, said black kids at the school were beaten even more savagely than white kids...

While it's worth keeping in mind that these are only allegations and the 32 anonymous metal crosses may or may not turn out to mark graves where human remains were interred, episodes like this weren't unknown from the time and geography.

If it turns out to be true, it's still unlikely that anyone will ever face charges for the murders. It's been 50 years or more; most if not all of the alleged culprits are likely dead themselves by now. Even if they weren't, I would imagine it would be nearly impossible to tie any surviving employees to a particular crime by now in a conclusive manner.

The image of a teenager in a dryer and the story of one inmate who simply disappeared... someone needs to interview the four survivors mentioned in the story for a horror movie. What a nightmare.

Greater Worcester Humanists Meeting: Big News

2008-12-10T05:25:00.004-05:00

Last night, LL and I went to the Greater Worcester Humanists holiday pot luck and yankee swap. There was a big announcement to start things off. Our chapter's president, David Niose, has been named president of the American Humanist Association. He'll begin serving his two-year term in January, moving up from his current position as treasurer of the organization.

It was also reported that due to the ongoing growth and success of we Greater Worcester Humanists, Cambridge-based Humanist Association of Massachusetts will be changing its name to Greater Boston Humanists to better convey their geographic extent. Big news; GWH is on the map all over the country.

The yankee swap was a hoot. The gifts ranged from the intellectual to the mundane to the hilarious. The most-swapped-for items were a Top 10 reasons why beer is better than Jesus pint glass and the Evolving Darwin play set. LL picked this one from the present pile but it got swapped away for a set of antlers. I was luckier; I traded a Disappearing Civil Liberties mug for a Holy Toast! Virgin Mary bread stamper. I can't wait to try it out.

The present I brought was an assortment of three books: Gould's The Panda's Thumb, Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things, and The Good Spell Book: Love Charms, Magical Cures, and Other Practical Sorcery. What good is Shermer's book without some weird beliefs as a companion volume, after all? As luck would have it, the person who wound up with the books was a woman whom I think was at least in her early 80's. I told her that I hoped the love spells would work for her. If she shows up at the next meeting with a 20 year-old boy toy, we'll all know why.

Since the Evolving Darwin Play Set seems to be the hot Humanist toy this year, I thought it would be only fair to "teach the controversy." I've thus intelligently designed an analogous toy for Creationists, the Creationist Darwin Play Set. Here's my prototype:

Larry Craig: Another Appeal Denied

2008-12-09T12:30:00.004-05:00

I noted yesterday that the appeal by former Florida state representative Bob Allen had been denied. While Allen's pretty well known in some circles, few cases of conservative politicians soliciting sex in men's bathrooms had garnered as much interest as that of Idaho Senator Larry Craig (R). As you may recall, Craig entered a guilty plea after his infamous "wide stance" solicitation in a bathroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and then said that he'd resign only to later not only fail to step down but to file an appeal seeking to retract his guilty plea.

A decision has just come down in the last couple of hours and, like Bob Allen, Larry Craig's appeal has also been denied. The full decision by the Minnesota Court of Appeals has been released, but the gist of it is that Craig's guilty plea will stand because he lacks any legal basis on which to retract it. Or, if you prefer your legalese undiluted:

To be valid, a guilty plea must be "accurate, voluntary and intelligent." State v. Ecker, 524 N.W.2d 712, 716 (Minn. 1994). For a plea to be accurate, it must be supported by a proper factual basis. Id. Appellant argues that the plea was not accurate because it lacked a full record of supporting facts.

Appellant did not appear in person when his plea was filed, but a guilty plea is not invalid merely because it is entered in writing. See Minn. R. Crim. P. 15.03, subd. 2...

But, because appellant did not appear, the written plea petition was the only account given to the district court of appellant's version of the offense. The relevant paragraph of the petition states:

"I am pleading guilty to the charge of Disorderly Conduct as alleged because on June 11, 2007, within the property or jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Airports Commission, Hennepin County, specifically in the restroom of the North Star Crossing in the Lindbergh Terminal, I did the following: Engaged in conduct which I knew or should have known tended to arouse alarm or resentment or [sic] others, which conduct was physical (versus verbal) in nature."

...Appellant argues that because the paragraph lacks a description of the alleged conduct it fails to provide an adequate factual basis.

Appellant's argument is unsupported by the record. A verbatim record was required to be made of the August 8, 2007 proceeding at which appellant's petition to plead guilty was filed and he was sentenced. See Minn. R. Crim. P. 27.03, subd. 6(A) (requiring verbatim record of sentencing proceedings). A defendant is responsible for providing a record adequate for appellate review, including a transcript if necessary. See State v. Anderson, 351 N.W.2d 1, 2 (Minn. 1984) (holding claim of trial error could not be reviewed without transcript). Appellant did not order a transcript of the August 8, 2007 proceeding...
— Source

And it goes on from there, as legalese does, to set out why Craig's appeal simply doesn't hold water.

Larry Craig is still guilty by his own admission. More importantly than the legal offense he committed, though, is his hypocrisy in the whole matter, one that he maintains to this day. Craig, like Bob Allen, could remedy this by simply coming out of the closet and explaining his errors while maintaining that gay men can legitimately hold conservative political views and ideas that don't extend to curtailing the rights of other gay men in order to bolster their standing amongst the homophobic segments of society. He could point out that he served as a Senator in ways that otherwise represented his constituency and that his homosexuality, like all homosexuality, is at most a coincidence that, absent social stigmatization, has zero bearing on the fitness of an individual to serve in office, vote, serve in the military, or otherwise enjoy the rights and fulfill the responsibilities incumbent upon all of us as members of American society, no matter whom we might prefer to twiddle our dangly bits now and again.

Will he continue in his hypocrisy, though? I'd bet on it.

Obama Lights Up: Ruminations from a Fellow Addict

2008-12-09T07:41:00.003-05:00

Will the stunning revelations never cease? When pressed during an interview with Tom Brokaw, Barack Obama waffled a bit before admitting that he hasn't been entirely successful in kicking his nicotine addiction. He still lights up from time to time, but he's promised that he won't do it in the White House.

During his interview with NBC News' Tom Brokaw over the weekend, President-elect Barack Obama acknowledged that he has had some trouble kicking his smoking habit but promised that the White House would remain a smoke-free zone.

"There are times where I've fallen off the wagon," Mr. Obama said when asked if he had stopped smoking...
— Source

Let's get the obvious out of the way. Smoking is bad. Kids, don't try this at home. Everybody tells you this stuff, so why should I repeat it? In most ways, this item is a non-story. The last eight years of radical misgovernment have left many aspects of our nation's well-being in smoking ruins. A smoking Executive? If he can pull America out of its historical nosedive and make repairs to our economy, infrastructure, international relations and commitment to education, I don't care if Obama likes to pound nails up his nose while singing the theme song from Bonanza at 3:00 in the morning in drag. Really, really bad drag. Get over yourselves, snap snap.

So while I'll readily admit that a smoking president might not be the greatest thing in the world, it's far from the worst. I say this as a smoker myself, and one who, like Obama, has made repeated and unsuccessful attempts to kick the habit. In light of that, my first bit of advice to the President-Elect, were he listening, would be to stay away from Chantix. It did weird things to me when I tried it, and I got my hands on a prescription the week after it went on the market. Chantix impaired my memory and caused me to have multiple episodes of sleep paralysis that left me an utter wreck after about two months on the stuff. We can't risk having that in a president. All things considered, he's better off sneaking out to the Rose Garden for the occasional smokebreak... and so are we if he stays away from varenicline.

So, even though I am painfully aware of how addictive cigarettes are and have a pretty thorough understanding of how and why they're so bad for you, I'm going to play the optimist here and speak about the upside of this nasty habit. Yes, there is one and no, it's not worth the health consequences and no, this isn't an endorsement of inhaling particulate matter. Still, the guy already smokes. Let's think about the lung being half-full for a moment.

In one way, I've benefited from being a smoker. Because we smokers are banned from indulging our habit indoors in the workplace (and rightfully so), we have to step away from whatever else we're doing every so often in order to pump a little sweet, sweet nicocrackatein into our bodies in order to be able to maintain our concentration and evenness of mood. It's boring to do that by ourselves, so smokers naturally form little cliques that take breaks together. From experience, I can say that these little sessions have allowed me the opportunity to learn about all sorts of things — useful things — from other smoking colleagues. This is as true now that I am studying biology as it was when I was a headhunter. It's hard to get time from people to simply learn from them what they know; everyone's days are pretty full. Those smokebreaks make it happen. I've learned about everything from inside information regarding the executive teams at high-tech startups to the problems with designing primers for insect mitochondrial genes from fellow junkies.

Might Obama reap the same sort of benefit from amongst the negative consequences of his unhealthful indulgence? He might. You know, he might not be the only world leader, or staffer employed by a world leader, who smokes. He might not be alone out there on the White House steps puffing away in the dead of winter. Who knows what breakthroughs might come when he's joined out there by some government official from another country? What inside knowledge might he gain from sharing a few tar-tawnied moments with a staffer traveling with the Prime Minister of Brunei? Scorn if you must, but these smoke session are intimate in a way that the inside of an office or conference room can never hope to be. You're removed from that environment. You're outside. Maybe you're cold and feeling a little alienated. It's natural that such a situation breeds candor amongst those involved. Obama's health might suffer just a little, but we as a nation might just come out ahead because of it.

I have another common trait I share with Obama, or at least I like to think so. Both he and I are highly educated and possessed of a level of intelligence markedly higher than the outgoing president. The latter is, in and of itself, not saying very much, I know. Still, from my own experience I can state that my own awareness of both the costs of smoking and my inability (so far) to quit is a rather humbling thing. It reminds me of my own frailties and it probably does the same for Obama. Such weaknesses are intrinsically humiliating things to anyone with even a modicum of self-awareness, and Obama's waffling in the interview likely demonstrates that he has experienced a similar awareness and its consequent humbling effect. I've long maintained that anyone narcissistic enough to think they ought to be president probably shouldn't be elected, so it's a hopeful sign that Obama gets this periodic thump upside his head with the two-by-four of an unresolved character flaw. He's aware that he's not perfect, that he can do wrong by himself. He's not likely to wave that silly banner of divine right and council like some Chief Executives we know. I'm aware that plenty of people will disagree with this notion that I prefer my humans both flawed and aware of their flaws. Lots of folks think that a president should be a spiritual leader of some sort, a shining paragon of white knight rectitude. Me, I like to see that the guy knows there are some chinks in the armor. It's hard to be humble when one thinks of themselves as perfected. Besides, as embarrassing a habit as smoking is, is it really any more humiliating than

I think not.

Now, look, the fact that Obama is going to sneak off for a cigarette when the pressure is on every so often is not something to be celebrated. Still, presidents have done a lot worse in recent memory. I'll take smoke-n-choke over shock-n-awe any day of the week.

So, Mr. President-Elect, smoke 'em if you got 'em until you don't need to get 'em anymore. From one smokin' schmuck to another, you have my sympathy on this. It must hurt to have the press and the naysayers jabbing their fingers into this bullet wound in your self-image. I'm sure Michelle gives you as much grief over the habit as LL gives me; I also can't smoke in my home or in my office and I'm quite acquainted with the winter winds of New England as one result. Still, maybe you can leverage this for our benefit somehow. Whatever it takes. If I'm ever in DC and see you out having a dose of the bad stuff, I'd love to come and join in your act of enlightened self-destruction. I've got a few thoughts on research funding, and so do you. We can talk about it while we die just a little.

See? Smokers' optimism.

Bob Allen Update: Gay Conservative Racist's Appeal Denied

2008-12-08T17:48:00.003-05:00

It's been more than a year since we caught up with Bob Allen. You might remember old "Twenty Dollar Bob." He used to be a Florida state representative and outspoken right-wing voice in the state. Then he got busted.

On July 11, 2007, Allen was arrested in a men's bathroom for soliciting an undercover cop for sex. During his interrogation, Allen came up with a rather creative excuse for his... errr... activities:

Audiotape of a July 11 police-station conversation between Allen and Titusville Assistant Chief John Lau reveals Allen's excuse for discussing sex with an undercover officer at a park men's room.

He felt intimidated by the "stocky black guy" in the restroom (whom he didn't know was an officer) and several other "stocky black guys" sitting in the park (also, apparently, plain-clothes officers) and thought he was about to be robbed, Allen said. The officer first mentioned oral sex for money, and Allen simply went along with discussing the transaction to avoid becoming a "statistic," he said...

At one point, Allen asked [arresting officer] Kavanaugh: "You're not a cop, are you?" Kavanaugh replied, "Nah. If I was a cop, why would I be hanging around here?"

Allen's "I'm so scared of black men that I offer them money to allow me to perform oral sex on them" defense didn't work out very well (big surprise!). On November 10, 2007, Allen was convicted by a jury of solicitation and sentenced to six months' probation.

Today comes word that Bob Allen's latest appeal has been denied. Frankly, I don't think Bob Allen has any appeal to much of anyone these days, so denying it seems a bit redundant.

Bob really ought to come out of the closet about now and just admit to himself and everyone else that he's gay. The racism thing could definitely use some working on, but if he's honest about both things then he'll be the better man for it. Besides, it's not like there's much risk of anyone thinking less of him than they already do. Apologizing and remedying the hypocrisy can only do good.

Refrigerator Door: My Niece Mails Me a Masterpiece

2008-12-08T17:09:00.004-05:00

My niece is a consummate artist, and her talents extend far beyond hand-turkeys. She mailed me a drawing that arrived today, and it's a masterpiece!

As I am not myself an artist nor even an art critic, I don't know what it all means. Still... look at that composition! Those confident lines! That bold use of color palette! I'm telling you, the kid is the next Picasso.

Thoughtful child that she is, she also sent a note along with her artwork that undoubtedly would explain to me what it's all about. If only I were smart enough to understand...

That, I'm sure, makes it all crystal-clear.

On most days, I regret retrieving the mail. Aside from the occasional DVD from Netflix, mail is never good news. I live on email, so whatever comes in the post is either a bill or junk. It's a nice surprise to get something like this in that otherwise bleak box!

PCR: Please Chug Rapidly

2008-12-08T16:13:00.003-05:00

The South Park Paradox: God vs. Santa

2008-12-08T15:14:00.003-05:00

A holiday seasoned press release appears in today's endless stream of EurekAlerts. You have to read it all the way to the end to get to the punchline, though. I'll summarize a bit to save time.

Researchers ran across a study about children of ages 7-13's belief in Santa Claus in 1896. That same study was repeated in 1979. The study was conducted again in 2000. The trend found was that more parents thought it a good idea to perpetuate the Santa Claus myth in 2000 than in the previous years. 54% did so in 1896, and that had risen to 80% in the 2000 sudy. Children were more likely to figure out on their own that Santa is fictional in more recent times than they used to be; only 25% of parents finally broke the news of Santa's non-existence to their children in 1896. That number had reached 40% by 1979.

So 75% of 7-13 year olds in 1896, and 60% of those in 1979, figured it out on their own or found out from another child who had somehow learned the truth. The conclusion: kids are pretty good at looking at a story, looking at the real world, and figuring out which one they should believe over the other when the facts don't add up.

The punchline?

...If children attribute the same supernatural powers to Santa as they do to God, why do they stop believing in Santa, but continue their belief in God?
— Source

I don't know if the press release had intended to be funny, but I couldn't help a little chuckle of my own.

Free Science Publication: Evolution Education and Outreach

2008-12-08T13:41:00.000-05:00

The latest issue (Volume 1, Issue 4) of the publication Evolution: Education and Outreach has been made available free of charge to anyone who wants it. This link will take you to the main page, at which point you'll be able to navigate through the table of contents.

This issue is devoted entirely to that favorite Creationist shibboleth, the evolution of the eye. Much good stuff awaits those who seize the opportunity to download, download, download.

A hyphal tip to Genomicron for news of this great freebie.

A Question for Atheists: On a Related Note

2008-12-08T08:11:00.003-05:00

On a note related to the previous entry about David Klinghoffer, a question by Lee Shelton IV on his blog The Contemporary Calvinist asks:

If only the natural world exists, then how did belief in the supernatural evolve?

I've already given my answer. Won't you please take a moment to give yours?

Discovery Institute Paranormal Apologetics: Klinghoffer's Baffling Illogic

2008-12-08T08:07:00.001-05:00

The Discovery Institute has been for some years now a leading Disenlightenment think-tank. We could point to some rather strange stuff that emanates from its phlogiston-strewn halls well beyond its advocacy of Neo-Creationism. Nonetheless, it's left to David Klinghoffer to thoroughly explain what's at the core of this bizarre institution's ideology, which he does in an opinion piece appearing in today's Los Angeles Times:

Ghosts, aliens and us

By David Klinghoffer

When my wife and I had our twin baby boys circumcised in our home last year, the Hasidic rabbi who performed the bris left us with a surprising parting gift: an amulet for protection against demons... When I queried the rabbi about this... he gracefully dodged, referring me to unspecified kabbalistic secrets...

It was a reminder that, as much as we think of our age as cynical and literally disenchanted, supernatural belief has hardly been erased. In fact, it may be on the rise. A CBS poll in October reported that 48% of Americans believe in ghosts (and 22% claim to have seen one). Among those younger than 45, 54% believe, as opposed to 41% over that age. Belief in other forms of paranormal and occult phenomena is on the rise too: In the 1980s, 25% of Americans accepted the idea of alien abductions, for instance, but 40% say they do now, according to Newsweek...

...Sure, I'm skeptical about crop circles, conspiracy theories and cryptozoology. However, I'm also sympathetic to the late conservative philosopher and ghost-story writer Russell Kirk, who valued the paranormal for its suggestion that reality consists of more than mundane material processes. I get the persistent sense that something profound is affirmed by the eerie accounts...

Another possibility is that the human need to believe in the unseen world itself points to, while not proving, the reality of hidden dimensions. It could be that materialism -- the philosophical assumption that reality is nothing but physical stuff -- is a prejudice rather than a fact. Perhaps an unseen reality does exist, revealed in flashes that can be confusing or misleading, to which we sometimes give flaky designations. Like "Bigfoot."

Religions used to confidently navigate this twilight realm. Some faiths still do, quietly...

...As for the rabbi who presided over our twins' bris, the evangelistic branch of Judaism to which he belongs, Chabad, stands out as bucking the trend elsewhere in Judaism toward a pallid rationalism.

The same trend is mirrored in other faiths, especially the shrinking mainline Protestant denominations. It may be that such pallidness helps explain why Americans turn to florid paranormal beliefs, as opposed to traditional supernatural ideas...

Religious leaders representing respectable faiths, intimidated by secular prejudice, may wish to take note as they scan the empty pews. The human hunger for a vigorous, unapologetic interface with the unknown can't be entirely repressed...

In a nutshell (the best way to summarize the assertions of nuts, after all), Klingoffer's argument is that belief in UFOs and bigfoot are erroneous (don't tell Michael Medved!), but they arise because of an absence of the preaching of traditional forms of supernaturalism in religious institutions, and this belief, in turn, is evidence for the existence of the supernatural. This, in turn, indicates that materialism — or, more accurately, naturalism — is incorrect. Where to begin in this chain of fallacies?

I'll start off with Klinghoffer's lumping of bigfoot and UFOs with the supernatural. While these are, indeed, beliefs that something exists in the absence of any evidence that they do, or even can, exist in the real world, they are not themselves beliefs in anything supernatural. The belief that extraterrestrial spacecraft have or do visit our planet is a belief in quite natural, albeit unearthly, things. The aliens in the postulated ships are the products of the same natural forces we find all around us and the ships themselves would work by physical laws. Likewise, bigfoot, were it to exist, would simply be a huge North American ape that ate, breathed and reproduced like every other mammal. No prevalent ideas about bigfoot, as wrong as they might be, offer the conjecture that sasquatches are or do anything supernatural, and while the arguments in favor of their existence are incorrect, they are based precisely on naturalistic sciences like biology and ecology. Klinghoffer is equivocating right from the outset by redefining "supernatural" as meaning any phenomenon for which there is no reputable physical evidence. Given such a redefinition, he can proceed, as he does, to offer the misunderstanding of the physical world as evidence for the existence of a supernatural world or, as he puts it, "unseen dimensions." If one recalls that a common religious definition of "faith" is "belief in things unseen," it becomes immediately clear what he's up to. By doing it, he can assert that ignorance is religion; bigfoot is now an article of faith.

Which goes right to the next fallacy, namely the assertion that popular supernaturalism is the result of some diminishing of religious supernaturalism. This is a rather bizarre contention; all religion is based on belief in the supernatural. That is to say, there can be no religion that doesn't posit the existence of at least one deity which operates in a manner unbound by natural laws. Every religion, no matter how liberal it may be when it comes to social ideas and how rational it is when it comes to empirical reality, is rooted in a deeply held belief that something exists beyond the scope of the senses and beyond the possibility of measurement. Whether we're talking about non-evangelical forms of Judaism or mainline Protestantism, all religions must do this, and none of which I'm aware contend something to the contrary. Moreover, the postulation of supernatural causation to natural phenomenon is not some new thing; it has certainly diminished in modern times, but it just as certainly existed in the past, and that past is filled with any number of strange beliefs about the material world that have nothing to do with religion at all. Not so long ago, the supernaturalistic religious worldview was essentially all that existed, and yet the same people who believed in the religion also believed in ghosts and dragons and wizards. If anything, belief in those things were even more widespread in the past than they are today. When I walk down a city street today, I'm surprised if I see even one amulet hanging in a doorway to ward off the evil eye. If I were taking a walk through a 10^th century village, I'd be equally surprised to see a doorway without one. Religious belief in the supernatural is a factor that makes beliefs in other flavors of magic more palatable, not less. Conversely, the pews of churches and similar structures designated for the worshipful become emptier because the same knowledge that has led much of humanity to dispense with belief in ghosts and warlocks leads to less credulity when it comes to gods and devils. The former pair is far less of a leap, after all, than the latter couple. They were at least of human origin; ghosts used to be people, mages still are, and we know at the very least that people actually exist. There's empirical evidence that tells us at least that much. These other things, though, evaporate utterly when examined from a position of empiricism. It takes less of a leap of faith (and logic) to believe in magic than it does to believe in omnipotence or disembodied malevolence.

Still, all of this is but an appetizer before the main noxious entree, the assertion that any belief in the supernatural provides even a scrap of evidence that an "unseen dimension" exists. Using Klinghoffer's redefinition of "supernatural," this equation works out to the solution that one erroneous idea supports the validity of a different error. If I believe that cats visit the moon while I am asleep then angels are real. If I think that lightning bolts are hurled at the heads of sinners by angered ancestor spirits that live among the clouds then Moses parted the Red Sea. I am not exaggerating about this; Klinghoffer is actually asserting, after all, that belief in bigfoot means that there is a Kingdom of Heaven. It's an absolutely bizarre sort of reasoning, to use that term equivocally myself, but it's exactly what Klinghoffer proposes. Any sort of ignorant faith in things unseen and unevidenced will do for his purposes. This is the biggest and blackest tent of them all, and by accepting such things into it, Klinghoffer reveals to us the basis of all that he advocates as a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute. A statue of him should be erected at the front door of their offices, much like the Statue of Liberty. This statue would similarly hold a torch aloft, though it would have no flame upon it and the inscription upon the monument would read

Give me your ignorant, your superstitious,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe nonsense,
The innumerate refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the credulous, mistaken to me,
I lift my lump beside the night-dark tent flap!

The irony that someone who would himself engage in an archaic ritual in which the genitals of eight day old boys are cut up to mark a covenant with a deity, followed by hanging a magical talisman whose origins he does not know and is incurious enough not to bother investigating, arguing that naturalism is "bias" because it doesn't leave room for ghosts and demons, is rich and thick, indeed. That he accepts the "graceful dodge" of a holy man at its word and then denounces empiricism is laughable. This is the very stuff from which Dark Ages have always been made, no different from the taboos regarding treading in the shadows of ancient Egyptian priests or burning incense for the pleasure of the lares and manes. This is the very meat of the Disenlightenment served upon a darkly glittering platter of intellectual misdirection and garnished lovingly with something scraped from the bottom of a boot that has just come in from the cow pasture. For someone like Klinghoffer, the world can never be demon-haunted enough. Why else hang talismans warding off Lilith around one's home?

Personal Computer Turns 40

2008-12-08T05:09:00.004-05:00

It was 40 years ago tomorrow that the very first personal computer was demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute. SRI's PC already had a few familiar accouterments, including a keyboard and mouse. Who decided to call it that? Nobody knows. Even a very primitive form of the Internet already existed, documents could be hyperlinked, and the computer had something vaguely like windows.

People watching the demo — all 1,000 of them — were blown away by the proto-PC. It was the smallest computer they'd ever seen and it didn't use punchcards. It could even edit text.

40 years ago, this was big stuff. To celebrate, I'm going to stuff a cupcake into my CD drive today and click "burn." These things can eat now, right?

You can view silent black-and-white video taken from original film of the first PC demo here. It's too bad that there's no sound, though. If there were, you could hear the guy at the back of the auditorium shouting, "Now I can haz cheezburger!"

Forrest Ackerman Gone for the Moment: He'll Be Back

2008-12-06T09:50:00.001-05:00

The man who coined the term "sci-fi," who likely did more than anyone else to popularize horror and sci-fi cinema, and who long ago inspired a certain Mad Mycologist to a lifelong love of all things weird on celluloid, videotape and paper, has passed away at age 92.

Forrest J Ackerman, writer-editor who coined 'sci-fi,' dies at 92

Forrest J Ackerman, who influenced a generation of young horror-movie fans with Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and spent a lifetime amassing what has been called the world's largest personal collection of science-fiction and fantasy memorabilia, has died. He was 92.

Ackerman, a writer, editor and literary agent who has been credited with coining the term "sci-fi" in the 1950s, died Thursday of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles, said John Sasser, a friend who is making a documentary on Ackerman...

As readers of this blog know, I love horror flicks. I've been a fan all my life, and Ackerman is one reason that's so. When I was but a little gore-pup, at the age of no more than 5 or 6, I used to visit a local newsstand near my grandparents' home in Brooklyn every month to get the latest issues of Warren Publishing's Creepy and Eerie magazines. One day, I noticed another magazine on the same rack. It was Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland, and I was hooked. I read that magazine for years. I might not be the gorehound I am today were it not for Ackerman's successful effort to warp my young mind.

In fact, horror cinema would probably be very different were it not for Ackerman being right there as the genre blossomed in the drive-ins of the 1950's and 60's. I wonder if there would be a Troma today, for example, if not for Forrest J. Ackerman.

Not to worry, horror fans. Ackerman will be back shortly... no doubt as a 50' tall zombie with glowing purple eyes and tentacles for arms. If anyone could ever do it, it'd be Forry.

And when that happens, boils and ghouls, only the grateful shall be spared. So, thanks, Mr. Ackerman, for doing all you did — and will no doubt keep right on doing — to make me into the freak I am today. I truly appreciate it.

Godless Sign Found in Washington: True-Believers Say Dumb Things in the Meantime

2008-12-06T08:47:00.002-05:00

The sign placed by the Freedom from Religion Foundation in the state capitol building in Olympia, Washington and then stolen — possibly at the behest of notable falafel enthusiast Bill "Would You Look at the Size of That Head" O'Reilly — has been returned. It was dropped off at Seattle radio station KMPS by an unidentified man, received by receptionist Rose Gumpe and passed to DJ Ichabod Caine. It's now being used as promotional material by the radio station for Caine. KOMO-TV news in Seattle has the story:

According to local police in Washington:

State Patrol Sgt. Ted DeHart said the billboard was still on display Thursday evening when the Capitol rotunda building was shut down.

He said there would be no way someone not authorized to be inside could get in the building after it's closed at 6 p.m...
— Source

So it looks very much like an inside job, as it were.

It's worth noting that KMPS is a country music station, speaking perhaps to a conservative demographic in terms of its listeners (and recent guests on Caine's show have included Dinesh D'Souza). Caine had been discussing the sign on his show since it went up, although he denies any responsibility in terms of its theft. It may explain, at least, why the sign was dropped off at the station.

Personally, I think this event is yet another example of the "religion does not make people moral" principle. The situation is that religious groups were allowed to place displays on government property, and as both Governor Chris Gregoire and Attorney General Rob McKenna explain in a bipartisan joint statement,

The U.S. Supreme Court has been consistent and clear that, under the Constitution's First Amendment, once government admits one religious display or viewpoint onto public property, it may not discriminate against the content of other displays, including the viewpoints of nonbelievers.

That someone, or even some group of people, found the sign objectionable is not the point. The FFRF had the right to place their sign in the Capitol because other groups were allowed to advertise religion-related messages. There is nothing special about it being a couple of weeks before a holiday held in particular esteem by one such group; the same rights and responsibilities still apply, and unauthorized removal of the sign constitutes theft as it would during any other time of the year. A crime was committed, and the motivation for that crime being religious or political makes no difference at all. It is exactly the same crime that would have been committed if someone who agreed with the FFRF had swiped a baby Jesus mannequin from a creche.

Caine, for his part, misses a subtle but important point in the interview recorded above. He states that the sign is "negative speech." He's right in that, of course. The sign is making a manifestly negative statement about religion, as it was intended to do. However, any religious display, and in fact nearly every religion, makes an intrinsically negative statement about all other religions (or the absence thereof). Each maintains that it is the correct one and that others are, therefore, incorrect. The Christian religion teaches that belief in the divine nature of Jesus is necessary to gain a reward in the afterlife and "blessings" in this life, and that there is no other way. That's an essentially negative statement about any religion that doesn't include this belief and the accompanying obeisances. Islam says the same thing about the status of Mohamed as a prophet. In fact, both Christianity and Islam were formulated precisely as negative statements against what was perceived at the time as corruption within the existent religions from which they stemmed (Christianity regarding Judaism, Islam regarding both Judaism and Christianity). This isn't even touching on polytheistic religions. To say, then, that beliefs are to be inherently respected or should go unchallenged by negative statements about them runs precisely counter to why those beliefs were formulated into codified religions in the first place. A Christmas display, a menorah... it doesn't matter. None of them make only a positive statement of belief, they also make a negative statement about other beliefs. If they didn't, they would be meaningless. The FFRF's sign was more explicit in it's statement of non-belief, and that non-belief was about the very supernaturalism upon which religions are based. One God is, after all, just one more than none.

That true-believers realize all of this at some level is exemplified by another sign put up in the State Capitol by Ken Hutcherson, former NFL player and Tim LaHaye/Rush Limbaugh disciple and present senior pastor at the Antioch Bible Church:

The controversy over the anti-religion sign prompted Rev. Ken Hutcherson, pastor of the Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland, to post a pro-religion sign about 15 feet from where the athiest sign was located.

It reads: "There is one God. There is one Devil. There are angels, a heaven and hell. There is more than our natural world. Atheism is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."
— Source

To make such a statement, Hutcherson first has to know in some way what the basis of the FFRF's sign was and how it ties into the state-sponsored religious debate that has been opened up in the capitol building. Of course, stating that a non-belief can be superstition or myth — both of which categories are entirely based on positive beliefs — is stupidity, duplicity, or both. If Hutcherson himself weren't part of the effort of one religion to make negative statements about others, moreover, his church would not have the following as elements of their doctrinal statement:

We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the verbally inspired Word of God, the final authority for faith and life, inerrant in the original writings, infallible and God-breathed..
In other words, all beliefs other than ours are wrong. This is "negative speech.
We believe that man was created in the image of likeness of God, but that through Adam's sin the race fell, inherited a sinful nature, and became alienated from God; and that man is totally depraved, and of himself utterably unable to remedy his lost condition (Genesis 1:26,27; Romans 3:22,23, 5:12; Ephesians 2:1-3, 12).

We believe that salvation is the gift of God brought to man by grace and received by personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ...
This, of course, means that anyone who doesn't hold these beliefs is "fallen" and not "redeemed." It's a negative statement couched in a positive assertion

The sign may be back, but the episode points out that there is a growing connection between the right to free expression and the holding of a particular set of beliefs in a worryingly substantial portion of the American populace. In Washington, this connection found expression in the theft of the sign by an as-yet-unidentified (and likely to remain unidentified, unless he seeks publicity) culprit with very specific motives. In California, it was a local official who brought pressure to bear for the removal of a statement of non-belief after calls from a few religious residents. Statements that challenge religion are seen as things to be excepted from free speech.

When and if that happens, the true-believers can fight it out amongst themselves whose statements of belief are allowable and whose aren't. After all, ask a religious Jew what he/she thinks about the divinity of Jesus and he's going to make a negative statement in all likelihood. If statements about the non-existence of God aren't protected, then why should we expect that statements about the non-divinity or non-existence of Jesus would be? And after they get that hashed out, maybe they can have a boxing match to decide whether the denial of papal infallibility and the central importance of the Vatican by Protestants should be protected or not.

Given the time, I'm sure that believers like Hutcherson can ultimately figure out exactly which speech and which religions are guaranteed freedom... and which aren't.

Oddly, enough, the FFRF sign never mentions any such things and no atheists I know of have suggested that the negative statements about reason and logic made by the religious should be considered blasphemous and so not protected speech. You can't have blasphemy without the belief to blaspheme in the first place. Without the superstition, there can be no violation... which would throw a bit of a kink into Hutcherson's very silly sign if he only hadn't gotten a few concussions back when he played football.

Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers: BOOM!

2008-12-06T06:50:00.001-05:00

There's another Wal-Mart going up on what used to be the site of a US Steel plant between Route 146 and the Blackstone River here in Worcester. Construction ran into a little snag yesterday, though, when three unexploded 8" shells were found buried there:

Artillery shells found buried

By Steven H. Foskett Jr.

Explosives experts and local fire and police personnel spent several hours yesterday trying to figure out what to do with old artillery shells found by construction workers on the site of the former U.S. Steel complex on Tobias Boland Way.

A state police bomb squad spent most of the afternoon and early evening on the vast construction site, which is slated to become a Wal-Mart retail store...

"It appears to be old ordnance," District Fire Chief Ronald Fritz said. "There were a couple of eight-inch shells, about 16 inches tall. They've been there for years."

He said the state bomb squad was called in, and said they were trying to determine what to do with the ordnance — take it somewhere, or detonate it on site...

Here's my suggestion: leave the shells where they are. Wal-Mart's effects on a community are often worse than a couple of small explosive devices going off and we've already got several superstores in the area. Besides, wouldn't it be just a little bit more exciting to shop at Wal-Mart if you knew that doing so could result in grievous bodily harm at any moment? I haven't heard that the Valley Stream, NY superstore is closing down just because of a few tramplings. Why should a couple of old artillery shells be bad for business in Worcester?

The Bay Area Fungus Fair Starts Today!

2008-12-06T05:57:00.005-05:00

It's hard to believe that another year has flown by, but it's once again time for the Mycological Society of San Francisco's annual Bay Area Fungus Fair at the Oakland Museum of California. The San Francisco Chronicle's description of the event contains a line that probably comes closest to my own sentiments about it:

Wake up and smell the spores, people! It's finally, finally, finally time again for the unutterably fabulous Bay Area Fungus Fair...

The fair starts today and only runs through the weekend. This is the event that turned me into a mycologist; it marks a kind of anniversary for me. I wish I could be there this year!

More information on the Bay Area Fungus Fair can be had at the Oakland Museum of California's website:

December 6-7, 2008
Fungus & Fire
39th Annual Fungus Fair

After a forest fire, what is the first sign of life?

Fungi. Their tiny root-like fibers appear on the charred forest floor and begin to break down debris and release nutrients into the soil. This age-old process is crucial to soil restoration and the forest's revival.

Learn about the noble lives of mushrooms at the museum's annual Fungus Fair—Fungus & Fire, Saturday, Dec 6 (10 a.m.–6 p.m.) and Sunday, Dec 7 (12-5 p.m.). The fair explores the role of fungi and mushrooms in the aftermath of California's devastating forest fires...

If you're within 100 miles of Oakland, CA and you've never been to this event before, today's a great day to check it out for the first time. I've been around a few fungi, but the Bay Area Fungus Fair is the premier event for those who want to check out and learn about the incredibly diversity, beauty and even downright weirdness of one of this most unusual kingdom.

The Oakland Museum of California is located at 1000 Oak Street, the corner of 10^th. Here's a map.

Are you in the car yet?

Prop 8 the Musical: Filled with Win

2008-12-04T07:47:00.001-05:00

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Of course, there are those who disagree and think the video is full of.... SATAN!

...Our world is becoming increasingly consistent in its hatred of Christians and more and more prepared to receive God's judgment for its open rebellion against His commands. Soon, I fear for the lost, the festive singing and musical blasphemy embedded below is going to be over for them.

The Bible makes it clear - and in no uncertain terms - that when the world becomes as it was when Lot lived in Sodom, God is going to shake this world like a sapling in a hurricane...

It's coming around! It's coming around as clear as crystal, isn't it?

...It's a Satan thing, you know?

Gee, and I thought these folks wanted the son o'Jehovah to hurry back.

OOGA BOOGA! Satan Satan Satan Satan! The tooth fairy is coming to judge the living and the dead and yank out the fillings of all the bad little boys and girls and toss them into your War on Christmas stockings!

Darwin Bicentennial Celebrations at Florida State University

2008-12-04T07:02:00.001-05:00

Things sure have changed at my alma mater, Florida State University, since I graduated. A couple of years ago, there were no Darwin Day events and it fell to a small student organization of which I was a member to put together the first one. It was a very small affair with no sponsorships from either the university itself or the local community. We couldn't even get indoor space on campus to stage the thing.

Now look at everything that's going on for 2009!

March 17
Peter Harrison; Professor of Science and Religion, Oxford
The Origins of the Conflict Between Science and Religion
March 18
Gary Mormino; Professor of History, U. South Florida
The Origins of Modern Florida: From Swamp to Swamped
March 19
Sean B. Carroll; Professor of Biological Science, U. Wisconsin-Madison
Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species
March 20
Lisa Randall; Professor of Physics, Harvard University
The Origins of the Universe
March 21
Science & Arts Fair Special Feature: The Florida Book Award Winners Showcase
An all-day celebration with special exhibits and fun events for all ages!
March 24
Screenings Feature: Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus (2006)
More films and times: TBA
March 25
Eugenie Scott; Executive Director, National Center for Science Education
The Origins of the Great American Creation Science/Evolution Debate
March 26
Ron Numbers; Professor of the History of Science, Medicine and Religion in America at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Evolution of Creationism in America
March 27
Don Johanson; Professor of Anthropology, Arizona State University
The Origins of Human Development
March 28
Scotty Barnhart & Friends; Professor of Jazz Trumpet, FSU
The Origins of Jazz: A Tribute to the Evolution of America's Own Musical Art Form

I'm not sure why all this is going on in March instead of February, but at least it's happening down there in North Florida! It's a far cry from that first event in 2007:

Exorcism in Texas: American Kindoki Kills Another Child

2008-12-03T22:29:00.000-05:00

There's been yet another exorcism-related death in the US. This time it's in Henderson, Texas where a couple of 18 year old parents beat their 13 month old child to death with a hammer and possibly several other blunt instruments in an attempt to "drive the demons out." Oh, and they bit her at least 20 times, too.

Couple Bit Child More Than 20 Times in Fatal Exorcism

by Kenneth Dean

They claim they were trying to drive the demons out of the 13-month-old, but law enforcement officers say the bottom line is a Rusk County couple bludgeoned the little girl to death with a hammer and other objects and bit her more than 20 times in the most grotesque murder the seasoned officers can remember.

Blaine Keith Milam, 19 and Jesseca Bain Carson, 18, both of Henderson, remain jailed on $2 million bonds each. They are charged with capital murder for the Tuesday morning death of Carson's daughter Amora Bain Carson...

"They had multiple stories they went through before they told us they had beaten the child to death," he said. "It is their version of the truth."

Humber said the couple then told deputies the child was possessed and they were trying to rid her of demons.

An arrest affidavit states Milam performed an exorcism of the demons possessing their child. The affidavit continues to state after Milam killed the child with Carson looking on the couple "drove to Henderson to pawn some items to pay for an exorcism."

Officials said Milam and Carson told detectives they decided to hire a priest after the exorcism went badly...

Milam also has a previous criminal record of assault on a child and domestic violence.

This is no different from the kindoki mass panic going on in Africa. It's not even that uncommon that forceful exorcisms occur in Texas, a state whose Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that churches can't be sued for conducting these barbaric rituals. How many more children are going to die as the result of a parent believing in demonic possession? Children are being beaten to death, strangled, and stabbed. Rather than try to stop it, organized churches — the Catholic church in particular, but by no means only the Catholic church — continue to propagate the superstitious belief in evil spirits, adding only the caveat that only their clergymen are qualified to perform the gibberish rites to remove the nonexistent spirits.

Until religious officials stand up and admit that all their bullshit about possession and demons is exactly that, this is going to keep on happening. It will happen again and again and again so long as Evangelicals put forth their deliverance ministries and the Vatican trains exorcists and religions keep telling people that they can be possessed.

It's a lie. It's a fairy tale. It's fraud. Every pastor, every priest, every one of them, is complicit in these deaths. If not for them, the very circumstances that fosters this insanity would ultimately cease to exist. That should have happened centuries ago.

Who's Healthy: America's Health Rankings 2008 Issued by United Health Foundation

2008-12-03T17:32:00.001-05:00

United Health Foundation has just released its 2008 America's Health Rankings. The report considers a number of components the UHF considers important to public health, analyzes their availability compared to a national mean on a state-by-state basis, and then ranks each state according to its overall score.

The overall result is shown in the following chart, listing the states from healthiest to least healthy according to the study's metrics:

I won't get into the minutia of everything that went into these calculations. If you're interested in them, all the information you could possibly need is available via the UHF.

It's also interesting to check out the Nation at a Glance clickable map. There, you can click a state to get a brief list of strengths and challenges as well as a snapshot that gives considerably more detail of trends in the state.

A few particulars leap right out, though. With the exception of Nevada (#42), the bottom 10 states in terms of overall health are all southern states. Five of the top ten (Vermont #1, New Hampshire #3, Massachusetts #6, Connecticut #7 and Maine #9) are in New England. In fact, the only New England state not in the top 10 is Rhode Island, which comes in at #11. No southern state made the top 10; the highest ranked among those is Virginia at #20. In fact, it's the only state in the southeast that comes in above the national average, to which Arizona comes closest.

According to the report, Massachusett's biggest overall public health challenge is binge drinking. Louisiana, at the bottom of the list, has low binge drinking as one of its strengths. This reveals a personal bias of mine; because of Mardi Gras, I always connect Louisiana with drinking, so it's a surprise to learn that its more of a problem here than there.

I also can't help thinking back to the Pew Religious Landscape Survey (I blogged about it here). It's interesting to note that the most religious states are also the ones that come in at the bottom of the UHF's health ranking and the least religious come out near the top. Mississippi, for instance, was the most religious state of all according to Pew's metrics and according to UHF ranks #49 out of 50 in terms of public health (it ranked dead last in 2007, but Louisiana has now surpassed it). This is correlation and doesn't demonstrate that poor public health increases religious sentiments, nor vice versa, but the correlation is unmistakable overall (Utah in particular bucks the trend, however). I suspect that there may well be a factor common to both religious fervor (e.g. fundamentalist tendencies) and poor health when it comes to the bigger public health picture. Perhaps poverty, for instance, and/or lack of access to good education might be a contributing factor in the correlated results of both studies.

In any case, the Health Rankings report is interesting to poke about in. Enjoy.

Kindoki: Exorcism and Abuse in Africa, America and the UK

2008-12-03T07:52:00.000-05:00

A new vocabulary word for non-African readers today: kindoki. That word embodies the belief now prevalent in many parts of Subsaharan Africa that children are demon-possessed witches. It's a pernicious idea being spread by Pentecostal Christian preachers that is resulting in a crisis for African children who, when accused of kindoki, find themselves abandoned by their families and sent to religious camps to be exorcised. The practices associated with this are horrible and a direct consequence of a religious fervor stoked by the preachers for their own benefit at the expense of children and families in countries like Congo, Angola and Nigeria.

Persecuting the African child

by Olusegun Fakoya, Nigerian Tribune

Africa abounds with various forms of child abuses, arising mostly from prevalent poverty and ignorance. This notwithstanding, the paramount role of the child in the African setting has never been in question. However, the traditional African belief and attitude to children has been successfully fractured by those who have deliberately perverted traditional belief and infused it with a distorted dose of Christianity...

...In the Congo Republic, a surprising number of children are accused of being witches, and thereafter, beaten, abused or abandoned. Child advocates estimate that thousands of children living in the streets of Kinshasa, Congo's capital, have been accused of witchcraft and cast out by their families, often as a rationale for not having to feed or care for them. There are over 50,000 homeless children on the streets of that lawless city...

...a shockingly high proportion of these children are on the streets because of the mushrooming influence of the new revivalist churches who have comfortably carved a commercial niche for themselves in the business of "child kindoki"... In 2006, Congo's Social Affairs minister, Bernard Ndjunga, estimated that as much as 50,000 children might just be illegally detained by churches specialising in the removal of kindoki...

...Congolese pastors invaded Angola, bringing with them the message of kindoki and further destabilization of an already fractured society. In 2006, it was officially estimated that one northern Angolan town had over 400 abandoned and abused children stigmatised as witches... it was easy for the notion of child witches or kindoki to gain a firm foothold in Angola as in many other African nations, as one of the key African beliefs is that of the potency of witchcraft. It is commonly believed that witches can communicate with the world of the dead or other such supernatural plane, and usurp or "eat" the life force of others, bringing their victims misfortune, illness and death. Adult witches are said to bewitch children by giving them food and then using them to achieve their nefarious goals by bringing misfortunes to their families, causing illness, bad luck and death. In retaliation, gory tales abound of the atrocities committed against children in the fight back against child witches. Two cases were particularly significant. A mother blinded her 14-year- old daughter with bleach in an attempt to rid her of evil visions, while a father injected battery acid into his 12-year- old son's stomach because he feared the boy was a wizard...

One of the notable propagators of kindoki in Congo DR is Prophet Onokoko who as at 1999, had over 230 children on his book, all accused of witchcraft. He employed what he termed "vomit up the devil system" to exorcise children of kindoki. This is the regurgitation of strange objects after these kids have been forcefully made to drink bizarre concoctions. There are other sects involved in these unwholesome practices in Congo, chief amongst which is the Combat Spirituel Church with its headquarters in Kinshasa and numerous branches all over the country and outside, United Kingdom inclusive [NOTE: this same church does have a US branch in North Carolina] ...

...the current situation in Akwa Ibom State and other parts of the Niger Delta remains a shame. For as long as it is allowed to continue, it remains a stigma on Nigeria. For as long as it flourishes without restraint, for so long will it remain a blur on the conscience of the Christian Association of Nigeria and all those who at daggers drawn in defence of the impeccability of modern-day Pentecostalism. For as long as this unchecked instances of child abuse reign in Nigeria, for so long will men and women of good will and clear conscience the world over, continue to confront the problems created by a nation that has allowed its territory to become a nightmare for innocent children...

...The United Kingdom abounds with Nigerian-oriented churches practising the Nigerian version of Pentecostalism with its prejudices and notable flaws. This is said with reference to the unwholesome impact of non-Nigerian sects like that of Pastor Gilbert Deya and so many others from the African continent. In essence, Britain remains like a microcosm of Africa with our blemishes and impurities fully represented. The practice of kindoki is strongly rooted in the Congolese communities in the United Kingdom. Cases abound where parents have attributed ill luck in the UK to kindoki in their children. Often times, such children have been returned to the Congo for exorcism, some not to be seen again...

Governments of the world need to come together in action and in deeds to tackle the menace posed by the phenomenon of kindoki or child witches. Africa as a continent can only become further impoverished by the sustenance of this retrogressive practice. In this age and time, what Africa needs is not the concept of child witches but technological advancement, economic, social and political emancipation. Africa needs enlightenment and not the concept of child witches...

Here in the US, of course, we've already seen one political candidate who almost certainly buys into kindoki and stood on stage with an African religious figure, Thomas Muthee, to get his protection against it:

The ignorance isn't confined to economically and socially struggling African countries; we've got our own child exorcisms in the United States. There's more than enough superstitious, ignorant nonsense to go around and we've certainly got our share here in the states.

...Maxwell, pastor of The Theatre Church, The Sword of the Spirit Christian Church Ministries, a Bible-based ministry, performs what is known in charismatic Christianity as deliverance ministry, in which people are not possessed, but feel they are oppressed, controlled or influenced by evil spirits or forces...

...In more than 40 years of ministry, Maxwell said he has cast evil spirits out of more than 250 people, and many more still seek his help...

Deliverance and exorcisms have seemingly increased during the past 30 years due to the growth of cults, satanic masses and the worship of and interest in witchcraft, said the Rev. John Wassell, a priest for the Archdiocese of Newark. "The lessening of Christian culture and the interest in other spiritual cultures have increased these problems," Wassell said. In the Catholic Church, deliverance ministries are also offered. "The church does everything to rule out possible psychological problems," the priest noted...
— Source: Dealing with Demons, The Montclair (New Jersey) Times, Nov. 13, 2008

Kindoki is kindoki is kindoki, and whether we call the reaction to it exorcism or deliverance ministry makes no difference. That there still exist institutions that teach true-believers that evil spirits are real, that they somehow take control of and manipulate real people, and that only supernatural means can combat them is the point. It's tempting to look at what's happening in Africa and say to ourselves something about those backwards people way over on the other side of the world, but what then do we say about people like Sarah Palin and Elbert Maxwell and John Wassell, not to mention the millions upon millions of Americans who believe in this stuff?

We should make no room in this world for this fear. All people are entitled to live their lives with a degree of knowledge sufficient to understand that there are no evil spirits and, for that matter, no spirits at all except in the metaphorical sense. All the evil in the world is done by human beings to human beings at their own discretion, not because some devil is whispering into their ears or guiding their hands. Until we arrive at that point, there will always be periods of history in which the belief in superstition eclipses reason to the extent that what amounts to torture, slavery and murder seem justified as means of combating the forces of darkness and so become the real forces of darkness, all-too-real evils that afflict nations from India to the UK to Nigeria to America.

Every time a purveyor of satanic hocus-pocus takes a stage, any stage at all, he or she should be shouted down in derision. We have got to cast off these fictions, whether they are espoused by a candidate for political office, a Catholic church official or an African Pentecostal child abuser. These beliefs are due no respect. They're poison and should be treated like toxic waste left over from a dark age — because that's all they are.

Romania Drops Evolution from Education, Substitutes Religion

2008-12-03T05:29:00.005-05:00

Romania has decided to duck behind an Iron Age curtain. The nation's schools have stopped teaching evolutionary biology and instead requires students to attend compulsory religious instruction classes. Previously, students were taught about evolution at age 18 or 19, in itself an entirely inadequate requirement if they are expected to understand biology.

Romania removes theory of evolution from school curriculum

Romania's withdrawal of the theory of evolution from the school curriculum could be evidence of a growing conservative tendency in teaching. Evolution has been removed from the school curriculum in a move which, pressure groups argue, distorts children's understanding of how the world came into being.

Meanwhile, religious studies classes continue to tell Romanian children that God made the world in seven days.

The theory of the Origin of Species and the evolution of humans is no longer present in the compulsory curriculum, through a nationwide decision made under the previous Government in 2006. Before the change, Darwin's theory was taught to pupils aged 18 or 19 years old...

Meanwhile, in religious classes, pupils are taught that the world was created in seven days and God made plants on the third day and the sun on the fourth. Textbooks claim the first man was Adam, who was 'made of ground', and that Eve, the first woman, was made from one of her husband's ribs.

"The Romanian state, whether it intends or not, offers pupils a unique perspective on the world, the religious one, without any critical scientific or philosophical offset," argues [Remus Cernea, president of Solidarity for Freedom of Conscience]...

Biology has been cut from two hours to one of teaching per week for the final two years in many high schools...

"Kids find out what really happened from the Discovery channel," she adds. "They don't really believe the world was made in six days. Well, I hope they don't..."

At present, children are taught religious classes from ages seven to 18. This is mostly an Orthodox curriculum. They are also taught that to sleep in on Sunday mornings is bad because children should be going to church.

"It's not being taught about religion and what it means," said one headmistress. If a parent wants their child not to attend the classes, because they are, for example, Jewish, Muslim or agnostic, he or she has to draft a letter to the school. The child then sits in a library or the head teacher's office working on, say, maths or languages.

But there are new proposals to make all religious classes compulsory for the education system, regardless of the parents' wishes. All children who do not want to attend Religion classes would attend a Moral and Religious Education class...

At last, the world has its Creationist, anti-science, anti-intellectual paradise. The "academic freedom" crowd should be most pleased; unfettered by church-state separation, the educational systems of places like Florida, Texas and Kentucky would look quite like that of Romania.

Perhaps the decision by Romania's government to turn that nation into a citadel of the Disenlightenment should be encouraged. American disenlightenment proponents ought to be encouraged to relocate to Romania. Their children could live out their lives there in exactly the sort of place they want the United States to become, an explicitly religious state where no challenges to church-sanctioned theology is allowed, where education is indoctrination, and where knowledge is made subservient to mythology with full governmental support. Don McElroy would surely feel right at home.

Psalm 100:1-3 is very relevant to this discussion:

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all you lands
Serve the Lord with gladness,
Come before his presence was singing,
Know ye that the LORD he is God:
It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves;
We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

(Notice, that this Psalm is address to "all you lands", i.e. all the nations, i.e. all people. This Psalm is not addressed solely to Israel. I don't believe there's a more emphatic, concise statement in the Scriptures than this that refutes the idea of evolution—"and not we ourselves"; and it is written to all people. And what is their response to be? It is to "Know ye that the LORD he is God".)

Also, in Job 38-41 we have an entire speech by God himself, where he articulates the Truth that Naturalism is false and he created all things.
— Source: Intelligent Design 2^nd Session, Don McElroy, February 6, 2005

Wouldn't Romania be the perfect place for someone like McElroy? His "intelligent design," a couple of fancy words swapped for Creationism, is perfectly in keeping with the theology that has now fully eclipsed education in that country, and it would certainly be better for America to put that particular Texan in Romania than it would be for Texas to wind up looking just like Romania.

Swapping Bodies: Researchers Fool Brains to Think They're In Mannequins

2008-12-02T16:46:00.003-05:00

Swedish researchers Henrik Ehrsson and Valeria Petkova have used technology to fool the brains of subjects into thinking that they're in mannequins instead of their usual bodies. It's pretty trippy stuff.

Cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet (KI) have succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The findings are published in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, December 3.

In the first experiment, the head of a shop dummy was fitted with two cameras connected to two small screens placed in front of the subjects' eyes, so that they saw what the dummy "saw." When the dummy's camera eyes and a subject's head were directed downwards, the subject saw the dummy's body where he/she would normally have seen his/her own.

The illusion of body-swapping was created when the scientist touched the stomach of both with two sticks. The subject could then see that the mannequin's stomach was being touched while feeling (but not seeing) a similar sensation on his/her own stomach. As a result, the subject developed a powerful sensation that the mannequin's body was his/her own...

In another experiment, the camera was mounted onto another person's head. When this person and the subject turned towards each other to shake hands, the subject perceived the camera-wearer's body as his/her own...

The strength of the illusion was confirmed by the subjects' exhibiting stress reactions when a knife was held to the camera wearer's arm but not when it was held to their own.

The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. However, it was not possible to fool the self into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block...
— Source: EurekAlert! Press Release

The paper, If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping, goes into great detail about how and why all this works. For me, the takeaway message is that we can be fooled about things about which we are normally quite certain if we rely on our senses alone. If we can be tricked into thinking that we're not in our own body but within an inanimate, albeit anthropoid, object, we can be tricked into just about anything if some unbiased intermediate observer or technology isn't used to make sure that seeing is truly worth believing.

I'm led to wonder, too, about the so-called "out of body experience" reported by some people who have come near death. If the changes that cause the apparent projection of consciousness into a dummy (no cracks about Dubya, now!) can be induced by the application of cameras, and that experience is fundamentally electrochemical, then surely a similar effect might occur as a result of the illness or trauma that leads to a near-death experience.

LL Sends Video, Causes Cerebral Aneurysm

2008-12-02T07:33:00.003-05:00

Despite LL having lived in the US for many years and now being a citizen, there are still some obvious cultural differences.

For example, there's a song from which she's sung a snippet of chorus for as long as I've known her. Something about "Boom boom boom, let's go back to my room." I'd never heard this song anywhere else. After our years together, she last night sent me a link to a YouTube video of said song.

I think she wants to kill me. The song is by someone named Paul Lekakis; I'd never heard of him. Nonetheless, I think this may qualify as the worst song of all time. Listening to it was physically uncomfortable. In fact, I could only get through the first 1:05 of the thing before I had to make it stop. It's horrible. I'm going to do the only sensible thing, then, and allow you, the reader, the opportunity to share my pain. Out of responsibility, though, I'll include an appropriate warning:

Worst. Song. Ever.

If you watch this thing all the way through, I'm convinced, you will die in seven days. Paul Lekakis will crawl out of your monitor and do you in.

According to LL, this song was quite popular when she lived in Lebanon. Perhaps it may have something to do with the collapse of that country...

Spirit of the Season: a Daily Jesus in Worcester

2008-12-02T05:14:00.002-05:00

Diane Williamson of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette has written a funny and insightful column today. In it, she reports a Daily Jesus right here in town. She gets why it showed up, too.

Jesus sighting interrupts my musings

When I returned Lisa's call yesterday, she requested that a photographer come to her house to take pictures of the Jesus image that appeared on the grocery receipt that got scorched by the steamed carrots.

While I assure you I'm not making any of that up, I also confess that I was only half listening to Lisa because yesterday was Cyber Monday, a retail-driven "event" that encourages American workers to shop online for holiday bargains, when what they should be doing is listening politely to people who are absolutely convinced that religious figures show up unannounced beneath their microwave vegetables...

And then there's Lisa. A 46-year-old Worcester woman, Lisa (she said I could use her entire name but I won't, as I plan to make fun of her) told me yesterday that she was steaming carrots in the microwave to make a beef stew, and she set the hot plate of carrots on top of her grocery receipt. Suddenly, she said, "with no warning," the profile of Christ showed up on the supermarket receipt, where apparently some of our top religious icons are appearing when they're not popping up on blueberry muffins and oil slicks.

"I wasn't even thinking about anything religious when it happened," Lisa noted. "It was very unexpected." She added, "You have to have good depth perception to see it."

I'll bet. I asked Lisa if she was sure that the image was that of Jesus, and she said she was, except that "his eyes look a little angry." And she said she had no idea why he would choose to appear beneath the steamed carrots.

"Maybe it's meant for people who don't believe," Lisa said. "I'll bring it down to you right now if you want."

Er, no thanks. I suddenly had too much shopping to do. But I'm guessing we'll see more apparitions as Americans grow more desperate and long for a happier, simpler time...

Williamson is probably correct. Now that the economy is in the tank, people are losing their homes and their jobs and their life savings and we seem to be in for a period of wrenching change, Jesus and Mary and others will be dancing atop muffins and peering from the windows all over the world. It's inevitable; it comes with the trauma in a culture that clings to myths of being saved by supernatural devices.

I mentioned in a previous entry that Jesus seems to show up frequently in unhealthy foods. Maybe I'm looking at that the wrong way; many such foods are precisely comfort foods. Such a connection probably isn't just coincidence.

Cincinnati Zoo Calls Off Creationist Theme Park Joint Promotion

2008-12-01T17:09:00.002-05:00

This morning, I mentioned a joint marketing promotion involving the Cincinnati Zoo and the Creationist Theme Park as one of the things that had me feeling down. This evening, I feel a little better because the promotion has been terminated before it even began.

Zoo pulls Creation Museum promotion

by Dan Horn

A promotional deal between the Cincinnati Zoo and the Creation Museum was scuttled today after the zoo received dozens of angry calls and emails about the partnership...

The deal appeared on web sites for both institutions Friday, but it was pulled by the zoo Monday morning after complaints about the partnership started pouring in.

Most of the protests echoed the same theme: the Creation Museum promotes a religious point of view that conflicts with the zoo's scientific mission. The museum promotes a strict interpretation of the biblical version of how life began, and it suggests that dinosaurs and man once lived side by side...

Kudos to everyone who took the time to call and/or email the zoo and express their concerns and upset. Anything that even remotely hints at legitimacy for the purveyors of animatronic religious mythology over evolutionary biology needs to be addressed by those concerned with the preservation of good science and sound reason.

India Lodges Formal Protest with Pakistan

2008-12-01T16:58:00.000-05:00

The government of India has lodged a formal protest with the government of Pakistan over the Mumbai terrorist attack:

Pakistan's High Commissioner was summoned and handed an official protest against Pakistan's alleged failure to crack down on terrorist groups within its country.

The Indian Government says the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were carried out by elements from Pakistan, and it expects the Pakistani Government to take strong action against those responsible.

Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma says the attacks are a grave setback to the relationship between the two nations.

But the Pakistani Government has denied any direct involvement in the terrorist strike.

Pakistan Prime Minister Syed Youssuf Rasa Gilani is urging calm, and says the blame game should be avoided at all costs.
— Source: Australian Broadcasting Company

This "let's not play the blame game" and the denial of direct government involvement in the attack seems a rather insufficient response on the part of Pakistan. It is worse if there was involvement between the terrorists and the Pakistani government, to be sure, but even if there is not, this doesn't excuse Pakistan's failure to clean up it's own house. The ISI certainly had a hand in breeding monsters in the past and the likelihood seems great that this latest batch of fundamentalist militants is at the very least a by-product of those past entanglements.

Pakistan has been, at least nominally, an ally to the United States in The War Against Terror (try the acronym from that one for size), and so its government has been aware of the use of Pakistan as an extremist breeding ground for some time now. They should have acted long ago to change the situation. They did not, and that is, indeed, their own fault.

That being said, a war in the region is unlikely to eliminate the terrorism and very likely to foster more of it. A destabilized Pakistan losing control of, or using, nuclear weapons is clearly in the best interests of no civilized segment of humanity, either. Pakistan should accept culpability in this and, as the brief description of the complaint given above notes, should take the strongest possible action on the most immediate terms possible to insure that they no longer serve as the launch pad for horrors visited upon people who are trying to do nothing more than live their lives.

Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford Provides Evidence That Prayer Works

2008-12-01T16:57:00.002-05:00

It's rare that we get any possible evidence that prayer works, so the story of Birmingham, Alabama mayor Larry Langford is a particularly interesting one. Let's start back on April 23, 2008. On that date, the mayor, already known for his public prayer vigils and sermonizing, issued a proclamation that his city was going to fight crime through "humbling itself." This was done through the wearing of sackcloth and ashes, and in this way, according to Langford, there would be divine intervention:

Mayor Larry Langford declared Friday as "It's Time to Pray Day" in Birmingham and will mark the event with a prayer service at Boutwell Auditorium.

Langford made the proclamation Tuesday during the City Council meeting.

"We're going to pray for a change in this city," he said.

During the service, participants will be given sackcloth to wear and ashes to put on their skin. The practice is mentioned in the Bible of the Bible as an act of repentance and humility.

Langford ordered 2,000 of the sacks...

Langford continued to defend his religious rallies and calls for prayer, saying the city needs both government and divine intervention to solve major problems including crime.

"The moral fiber of this community is also our responsibility," he said...
— The Birmingham News, April 23, 2008

To me, this sounds like an absolutely nutty idea. Still, maybe it worked after all.

Today, Larry Langford was arrested on 60 counts of corruption, bribery and filing false income tax returns. Hmmm...

Federal authorities arrested the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, on Monday in a corruption probe surrounding a massive sewer bond debt that has forced Jefferson County to the brink of bankruptcy.

Authorities arrested Mayor Larry Langford at his place of business in Birmingham at 7 a.m. (1200 GMT) and indicted him on 60 counts including bribery, conspiracy and filing false tax returns, according to U.S. Attorney Alice Martin...

"He sold out his public office to his friends Blount and LaPierre for about $235,000 in expensive clothes, watches and cash to pay his growing personal debt. All the while, Blount was paid fees topping $7 million," said Martin.

"Through a web of financing agreements Langford required many institutions to use Blount as a consultant so Blount would make fees and in turn pay off Langford," Martin told a news conference, adding: "It was a classic pay-to-play scheme..."
— Reuters, December 1, 2008

Can I get an "amen"?

If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, surely piety must be penultimate.

India and Pakistan May Be Readying for War in Aftermath of Mumbai Attacks

2008-12-01T07:50:00.003-05:00

It's beginning to look like the religious militants of the Deccan Mujahedin may get their way. Indian government officials are stating that they have certain proof of a link between the Mumbai terrorists and elements with links to Pakistani intelligence. Pakistan, for its part, is ending military operations along the Afghan border and putting its own military on stand-by for a confrontation with India.

At war level: India raises security status amid grief

by Randeep Ramesh and Jason Burke

The Indian government raised the country's security to a "war level" yesterday saying it had certain proof of a Pakistani link to the Mumbai attacks.

The dramatic move prompted Pakistan to say it would end military operations against Islamist militants on the Afghan border, which are critical to the "war on terror", for an "unwanted conflict" with Delhi...

...Sri Prakash Jaiswal, India's minister of state for home affairs, said the country's "intelligence will be increased to a war level, we are asking the state governments to increase security to a war level"...

...the group named by India, Lashkar-e-Taiba, has longstanding relationships with Pakistan's security establishment...

The Indian minister said yesterday there was "no doubt that the terrorists had come from Pakistan ... We have evidence of their nationalities. We will reveal everything soon"...

Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is fighting Indian control of the disputed Kashmir region, was behind a deadly 2001 assault on the Indian parliament that pushed New Delhi and Islamabad to the brink of war...

Wonderful. Two nuclear powers may end up at war, thanks in no small part to the actions of religious fundamentalists who dehumanize and kill. More death, more destruction, more horrors... maybe huge horrors, and the deaths of more innocent people could be the result of all of this. These are countries with nukes pointed at one another, both of which contain influential religious factions willing to die for their causes in order that they reap some divine reward.

I hope both can be convinced to step back from this brink. I also hope that more moderate heads prevail, even if they are religious ones. (c.f. Muslims Against Sharia).

Greater Worcester Humanists: Potluck and Yankee Swap

2008-12-01T06:52:00.002-05:00

Speaking of the Greater Worcester Humanists, our next event will take place on Tuesday, December 9. It's a potluck dinner and yankee swap:

We will host a Dual Humanist Celebration for HumanLight and Human Rights Day which both occur this month. Further information will be listed here, as well as at Meetup.com.

This will be a potluck dinner so plan to bring some munchies! A casserole, dessert, finger food or your specialty dish is appreciated. A safe bet is usually some kind of entree or appetizer. We usually start eating around 6:30.

We will also be having a Yankee swap. Each person that wishes to participate in the swap should bring a small (if possible, "humanism" related gift (suggested target price range of about $10). Last year's event was a fun time, with good food and good company, not to mention some pretty interesting and humorous gifts.
— Source

I'm not entirely sure yet of what I'm bringing for the potluck. I've signed up for an entree, though. I'm thinking about whipping up some hoppin' john. Most people around here have never heard of the stuff, and a bit of novelty goes a long way.

Corrosion of the Enlightenment: One of Those Depressing Mornings

2008-12-01T06:06:00.005-05:00

The Cincinnati Zoo is shilling for the Creation ~~Museum~~ Theme Park.

The Fundamentalist Faction within the US military is teaching soldiers, among other bizarre claims, that evolutionary biology leads to suicide, that Humanism is based on selfishness, and that Charles Darwin was the first leader of the Soviet Union. It's gibbering, drooling, Disenlightenment mental illness, and it's on the taxpayer's bill. The message is being delivered in mandatory indoctrination sessions, no less.

Even the erstwhile ScienceBlogs have been infected with anti-vaccinationist, anti-science nonsense. The source of the sickness in this case is Germany, and the anti-vaccinationist is joined by a second nutcase who insists that the heavy metals found in Ayurvedic woo-juice aren't harmful. This despite a recent investigation that noted numerous cased of lead and mercury poisoning tied to those same compounds.

Hyphal tips to The Austringer, Daily Kos and Respectful Insolence, respectively, for the heads-up on these three sad stories.

There are some mornings when the news from the front in the war against ignorance and disenlightenment are so depressing that I barely feel that it's worth my time to go into the lab. Heck, it's almost not worth my time to get out of bed. It seems that no matter what, the cancer is just going to keep on spreading. Just when things seem to be getting better, just when it looks like some progress is being made, the legions of lesions turn up somewhere else. That the forces of idiocy should find a home in ScienceBlogs, that institutions like the Cincinnati Zoo and the US military should be creating opportunities for the further corrosion of reason in favor of superstition and misinformation, are truly grievous situations.

It seems that not only sound, evidence-based science can be readily overturned by the machinations of mythologists, but even Constitutional law can be ignored with impunity.

On some days, that makes me want to stand up and push back hard. It's one of the reasons I decided to become a dues-paying member of Greater Worcester Humanists. It's one of the reasons that I want to teach sound science and engage in useful and revealing research.

On other days, though, the bad news seems so overwhelming that I just want to hibernate like a bear. It's tempting to get back into bed, leave a wake-up call for the time when knowledge is valued over blindly clinging to the ancient misunderstandings, and pull the covers over my head. It makes me want to have scotch for breakfast.

The latter is not an option, of course. I have primers to design, a report for the state DCR to complete (hopefully by the end of the week), phylogenies to infer. Until shariah is instituted in Massachusetts, I have work to do. Besides, we have 200 proof ethanol in the lab. That's even better than scotch... right?

Onward Christian Shoppers: Ironic? No.

2008-11-30T12:13:00.002-05:00

I was half asleep after the long drive home from Pennsylvania and fully asleep by 7:00 PM. Because of that, I woke up at 2:00 this morning and wound up watching CNN. As I watched the Prime News program anchored by Mike Galanos, I saw the following segment. The pay-off quote here comes at about the 1:35 mark:

Guest and forensic psychologist talks about how the trampling death of Jdimytai Damour at a Valley Stream, NY Wal-Mart on Black Friday was a typical case of herd mentality resulting from the loss of personal responsibility and the anonymity of a crowd situation, but then he notes at 1:38 that there is an "inescapable irony" that the tramplers were Christians. The psychic dissonance at work here was enough to stop me dead in my tracks. How can this event be both typical and ironic? Russell seems to be making the case that we should expect some special behavior from those who consider themselves (and are considered by others) to be members of a particular religion, as if a religious belief would immunize someone against typical human psychology.

I have my doubts about Russell's contention that the crowd that killed Damour, injured his co-workers, and couldn't be bothered to let the police try to rescue the hapless temporary worker, let alone stop their shopping frenzy long enough to lend their own aid, were typical. I'm not a psychologist nor even a particularly observant student of human behavior. He may or may not be correct in making that assertion. I can state from personal experience that I have been in a violent crowd situation, saw someone get knocked down and stopped to help that person get back on their feet and avoid injury. If that isn't typical behavior, in a crowd or otherwise, it's a sad statement about human nature. I didn't stop and think about doing it; I just did it because that's my own instinct. I'd hope that someone else would do the same for me if I needed it. I may not be typical, though. That small gesture might represent abnormal behavior. Perhaps there's something wrong with me.

The notion that one would expect Christians to behave differently, though, that a consciously-adopted belief should alter social behavior, is ludicrous. I don't find anything particularly ironic in Christians trampling someone, at least no more so than I'd find it ironic that Jews, Hindus or atheists would trample someone. Brian Russell seems to want it both ways; what's typical for everyone else is somehow atypical for Christians. Is there some evidence that he, as a psychologist, can present to back up this statement? He doesn't mention any in his discussion with Mike Galanos, and so the statement comes across as rather glib to my ears.

It hasn't been my experience with those who subscribe to the Christian belief set that they act much differently from anyone else. They may ascribe different motivations to their behavior and they may see a different significance to events than others, but aside from some very superficial and intentional things, I've never noticed much of a difference.

One thing that Russell says which I do find myself in agreement with is that the Black Friday homicide of Damour says something about our culture which is profoundly disturbing. That is, according to Russell, it demonstrates a fundamental devaluation of the well-being of others and a synchronous elevation of self-gratification as the highest good. Russell notes several other recent events that he connects with the Wal-Mart trampling, such as the recent online suicide of a Florida teenager during which nobody intervened and the hit-and-run victimization of an elderly man in Connecticut which saw the injured left lying in the street without anyone helping him. One could compile a huge list of such inhumanities, of course. It's easy to do in a country in which a large fraction of the populace can't afford health care.

We live all too much of our lives in customized bubbles now, I think. We have so much technology connecting us in superficial ways that we're losing our ability to connect in unmediated ways. We're suffering not from a lack of religion but from a lack of the real basis of morality. We're losing our empathy, our ability to understand without cogitation that others feel what we feel, are hurt by what hurts us, and have the same needs that we do. That the trampling took place at a Wal-mart is not insignificant; Wal-mart is perhaps the cheapest outlet in America for the purchase of the very devices that mediate our experience of the world, so the death of a human being in the clamor for inexpensive access to mediating, customizable, sensually titillating gadgets is precisely the message that we need to take away from this. These push-button self-gratifications have taken on a life of their own for much of our population, not in the way that another human being might be loved but in the way that our own hand, our own eyes, our own bodies have meaning to us. As we become more fused to the toys and technology that we place between ourselves and the fleshy, carbon-based world in which we should be living, we retreat further into this silicon cocoon. Empathy is abstracted, sympathy is viewed as some sort of deficiency, and "self-reliance" becomes a shorthand for "I'm getting what's mine, screw the rest of you."

Far from being resistant to this mindset, religious belief may make it easier. It allows the use of "God's will" to explain away the unthinkable, but more to the point it is a handy way of dividing people. It's one of the fissures among many that allow one group of people to see some other as less valuable, less good, less acceptable. Witness this statement by the very recently deceased George Docherty, the man largely responsible for cramming the "under God" bit into the US Pledge of Allegiance:

An atheistic American is a contradiction in terms," he said in his sermon. If you deny the Christian ethic, you fall short of the American ideal of life.
— source

Given the willingness that exists amongst the religious to denigrate others in this manner, why on earth should we expect, as Brian Russell seems to do, that they wouldn't be prone to the kind of behavior that occurred at Wal-mart and claimed one life? I am seizing on Christians here because that is the religion mentioned in the segment from CNN linked above, but I don't consider them a special case in this regard. I certainly heard the same sort of talk from Jews when I was growing up in a Conservative to Orthodox Jewish family, for instance. I was once informed by a Hindu priest that I couldn't be allowed to enter a temple at certain times because I was a mleccha, a term which I later learned translates roughly into English as a "barbarian" as well as a class label considered to be even more untouchable than the classic Untouchables. Need the caste system even be brought up in this context?

Such divisiveness is an inherent part of all religions, and the division always implies the lesser value of some human lives as compared to others if it doesn't state it explicitly. That value is assigned largely on the basis of belief. By adopting Christianity, the belief goes, one is forgiven at the outset and can obtain an unlimited number of future dispensations. Christians don't believe this is true of non-Christians, of course, and an atheist... well, an atheist can't even be an American.

It is ironic, though, that a forensic psychologist, who is at least nominally a scientist, should make the kind of statement that Brian Russell made about Christians without the least bit of empirical evidence to back it up. Christians are plenty violent, plenty callous, and just as much afflicted by the empathically deadening effects of consumer culture as anyone else. It was, after all, a Christian contingent that brought us the so-called Culture War in this country. If Christians are capable of declaring war against non-Christians, why should it seem ironic that some of them are capable of killing someone, too? Don't wars usually involve that sort of thing?

Jdimytai Damour was just collateral damage, an inanimate object in the minds of those who killed him and injured those who tried to save his life. This isn't about Christian or non-Christian, believer or non-believer. This isn't about Valley Stream, New York and it isn't about Wal-mart. This is all about America. This is what we're becoming.

Shock and awe hasn't even gotten off the ground yet. Watch out for we Americans; we're capable of anything, and we don't even understand why.

Christ Tells Texas Man to Punish Other Drivers

2008-11-30T06:14:00.005-05:00

Jesus apparently whispered into the ear of a man in San Antonio, Texas that another driver wasn't driving in a Christian enough manner. It was up to that man, 52 year old Michael Schwab, to carry out divine retribution... using his pick-up truck as an instrument of divine retribution at 100 mph.

'God said she needed to be taken off road'

...The bizarre incident that shut down southbound U.S. 281 above the Medina River happened about 7:25 a.m.

"He just said God said she wasn't driving right, and she needed to be taken off the road," said Lt. Kyle Coleman of the Bexar County Sheriff's Office.

The driver of the pickup was identified in a Sheriff's Office news release as Michael E. Schwab, 52, of Blooming Grove.

Schwab told first responders at the scene that "the other vehicle was not driving like a Christian and it was Jesus' will for him to punish the car," according to the release.

The 35-year-old woman was driving her sedan north when the pickup struck her vehicle. Schwab told deputies he was driving faster than 100 mph at the time, Coleman said...

The pickup driver did not specify for authorities how the woman was driving poorly. Investigators determined the female driver "had done nothing wrong," according to the release.

It is expected that Schwab will undergo psychological examination to determine whether he is mentally ill for thinking that invisible divinities are telling him what to do. There's no word yet on whether the other several billion people who believe the same thing will face similar investigations.

Refrigerator Door: Cow-Pig-Hand Turkey with Two Tongues

2008-11-30T03:16:00.002-05:00

My niece drew this the morning after Thanksgiving and decided that it was the one that I should have out of the many hand-turkeys she drew. She also had me and another relative drawing these, because it's no fun to draw hand-turkeys all by oneself. It's a group effort.

This particular turkey has two tongues. Why two tongues? Because she said so. It's also a cow-pig-turkey which, naturally, would have more than one tongue.

Die for Wal-Mart: Christmas Spirit in Suburban New York

2008-11-29T05:40:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was Black Friday, the most important day of the year for retailers in the United States. Millions of Americans get the day after Thanksgiving of from work and most of them go shopping. The stores start opening at ridiculously early hours and shoppers begin lining up at midnight in some places.

This year, the economy being as bad as it is, Wal-Mart is doing a booming business. So booming, in fact, that the Damour family has a whole new reason to call yesterday "Black Friday." It's the day when Jdimytai Damour, a temporary worker charged with opening the doors at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, NY, was trampled to death by a horde of shoppers who thought that getting first dibs on that new George Foreman grill was more important than safety or civility.

Worker dies, patrons injured in stampede at Wal-Mart

By Joseph Mallia & Matthew Chayes

A stampede of shoppers in a Valley Stream Wal-Mart on Friday morning left one worker dead and at least three patrons injured after an impatient crowd broke down the store doors and trampled the seasonal employee, Nassau police said.

Jdimytai Damour of Jamaica, Queens, was pushed to the ground by the 2,000-plus crowd just before 5 a.m. as management was preparing to open the store, which is located across from the main Green Acres Mall building. Hundreds stepped over, around and on the 34-year-old worker as they rushed into the store...

During the fracas, first-responders struggled to reach Damour to tend to him, witnesses said. Even the first police officers on the scene were jostled around, police said...

Amid the chaos in Valley Stream, shoppers were asked to leave by other store workers, said Cribbs. Others ignored the pleas that they stop shopping, move to the front of the store and exit, she said...

Frightened employees initially used the doors as makeshift shields to defend against the onslaught of shoppers, she said.

At that point, lots of people were on the ground, she said, not just Damour.

Authorities said Damour, who was pronounced dead at Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream, was working at the store through an employment agency that contracts with the retail giant...

People have lost their minds. A person died, and died horribly, because too many people needed some new toy at a discount more than they needed to stop and think about the well-being of a fellow human. Even when people were on the ground, even when police were trying to help an injured, bleeding person lying on the ground and not moving, the shoppers kept on coming. Nothing was more significant to them than an Incredible Hulk DVD or a sweater or who knows what other insignificant junk that would have been available some other day, if for a few more dollars. There was no reason for this to happen; Damour's death is meaningless and horrible. He was treated worse than we treat animals.

What possesses people to do a thing like this? If you see a crowd of thousands waiting outside a store, go home. Just go shopping some other day... or don't bother. Order online. How could one of these rabid shoppers even give a gift purchased while someone was trampled at the store where they got the thing? "Enjoy your new nose hair trimmer, Uncle Steve! Jdimytai Damour died for it."

If anyone had any doubts about the meaning of Christmas, rejoice. Your query has been answered. It's the most menacing time of the year.

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T12:12:00.003-05:00

For all of my American readers and friends, LL and I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving. Tycho, of course, is a lizard and has no concept of holidays. I'm sure he'd wish you many juicy crickets if he could, though, as long as he got some, too.

May your turkey be done just right, may your relatives all get along around the table, and may you not forget to have some antacids on hand. You're an American on Thanksgiving Day. You're going to need them.

For my readers and friends in India, we wish you safety, peace and calm. Now.

That extends to everyone else, everywhere else, come to think of it. On every day, too.

More tomorrow, with pictures, from a lucky and significantly larger mad mycologist.

Mumbai Mujahedin: Terror, Mass Murder and "Blasphemy" Resolutions

2008-11-27T11:31:00.005-05:00

Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.

I wonder if the 85 members of the UN General Assembly who voted on November 25 in favor of the anti-blasphemy resolution from whence those words came are feeling any sense of irony today, the day after an undetermined number of terrorists sormed into the Indian city of Mumbai and turned it into a war zone and killing ground. At last count, at least 125 people have died, 325 have been injured, and hostages are still being held by a group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedin.

Indian military commandos continued to exchange fire with an unknown number of militants one day after coordinated groups of gunmen shot and blasted their way through tourist sites around Mumbai on Wednesday night, apparently targeting American, Israeli and British citizens for use as hostages...

One hostage, a Polish national, said he was very happy to be free and praised the Indian military commandos. Moments later, a man identified as being of Lebanese descent was carried out with two other people, too weary to address the throng of reporters.

Most of Mumbai remained in shock today. In many neighborhoods, 80% of the businesses remained closed as police warned residents to stay at home, where many followed the unfolding drama on television.

A previously unknown group calling itself Deccan Mujahedin said it carried out the attack.

We will, no doubt, get some perfunctory denunciations from countries like Saudi Arabia that will tell us all about how these new mujahedin aren't really Muslims. The "no true Scotsman" argument is used so frequently by religious fundamentalists that its faux kilt is in dire need of patching from all the wear. They're not really Muslims in the same way that Ted Haggard isn't really Christian. When the true-believers go astray and start blowing up innocent people or molesting a few children or having sex-for-money, it's so easy to disavow them, isn't it?

In light of the UN General Assembly resolution, we're certain to be told that these mass murderers have no association with Islam. They're actually... what? Martians? Mutant ninja turtles? No, they're mujahedin. They're Muslim fundamentalist holy warriors, and their holy war means blowing up bombs and shooting up hotels and train stations. This is religion once again bringing people together... in morgues.

Although Mumbai has been the scene of several terrorist attacks in recent years, experts said Wednesday's assaults required a previously unseen degree of reconnaissance and planning. The scale and synchronization of the attacks pointed to the likely involvement of experienced commanders, some said, suggesting possible foreign involvement.

The terrorists struck almost simultaneously at the city's domestic airport and a railway station and sprayed gunfire at the Leopold Cafe, a restaurant popular with foreigners. As many as 16 groups hit nine sites on the southern flank of this crowded metropolis of 19 million...

Nobody knew, right? This is probably the biggest, most coordinated attack by holy warriors since the Afghan mujahedin were fighting the Soviets a quarter century ago... but nobody knew. No mullahs, no community leaders, nobody. No true Muslims were even complicit in this attack. Amazing. After all,

Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.

And how beautiful is this holy war that has been brought against the citizens and workers of Mumbai:

...Wednesday's attacks were a brazen frontal assault using automatic weapons.

The targets included police headquarters in south Mumbai, where some officers were pinned down by gunfire.

The victims included Mumbai's anti-terrorism chief, Hemant Karkare, and two of his senior police officers, which complicated the law enforcement response to the attacks. Television video showed Karkare donning a flak jacket and helmet minutes before heading into one of the hotels.

Witnesses said the attackers appeared to fire at random and made no effort to hide their identities, which, experts suggested, signaled a readiness to die...

How glorious. How noble. This is the will of God in action, is it not, that mujahedin should take up arms and fire randomly at human beings as they go about their daily business.

Across India, more than 3,600 people have been killed in terrorist incidents since January 2004, according to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, many involving sectarian disputes...

None of them were killed by Muslim extremists, though, because Islam is wrongly associated with terrorism, just like Catholic priests have been wrongly associated with pederasty. Religious people just don't do this sort of thing.

Aren't we sick of this yet? I'm not talking about Americans or Indians, and I'm not talking about atheists or religious believers. I'm talking about human beings.

Look, I'll be honest. I honestly have no use for religion in my life. I think its widest role in modern civilization is divide people and to hold back the progress of reason in our world. There are plenty of people out there who disagree with me on these points, and that's fine. I don't want to blow any of you up, and I have enough faith in the vast majority of my species to believe that the feeling is mutual.

Still, isn't it about time to confront the fact that much of the violence of the kind that we're seeing in Mumbai, that has been see in India so frequently in recent years, that has happened in the US in places like New York and Oklahoma City, that took place in Guyana 30 years ago, that all of this is tied to religious belief and is justified in the name of doing the work of some deity or another? It's not my place to drum these strains of violence out of religion. People like me are more inclined to chuck the whole thing out and rely on empiricism and empathy, not on allegedly divine laws. It's the place of those within religion to make the changes, if they can be made at all, that will insure that things like what is happening even now in Mumbai never, ever happen again. That can only start when religious moderates come to understand that there is something present in their religion as it is understood by all too many people that calls for war, whether it's a shooting war in India or a culture war in America. When you call for war, you'll find volunteers to carry it out sooner or later.

In Mumbai, those volunteers call themselves the Deccan Mujahedin today. They are terrorists associated with Islam.

The UN General Assembly should spit that stupid anti-blasphemy resolution out like the mouthful of garbage it is and instead start looking into why Islam — and Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, all of these religions — sooner or later foster the birth of monsters.

The blood of the thousands, the millions, of the victims of dehumanized mujahedin calls out for this. Will it ever get done, or will there be another hundred Mumbai Novembers, 9/11's, Tamil Tiger suicide bombings, holy war without end?

Enough. Enough, enough, enough.

The Massholes Have Landed

2008-11-26T18:39:00.002-05:00

LL and I are in Pennsylvania and happy to be out of the car. Very, very happy. We didn't hit any traffic and actually made very good time, but it's still a long drive. Our GPS unit, AKA the Lady in the Box, decided to throw a tantrum a few miles outside of Scranton but hey, who hasn't thrown a tantrum or two around there?

Our rental car for the trip is a 2009 Chrysler Sebring. It would make an excellent golf cart. Still, it got good mileage and we've arrived in one piece. That's all that matters.

Our hotel room is quite adequate for our purposes for the evening... sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a tremendously fun day.

A Few Irreligious Thoughts to Ponder

2008-11-26T05:44:00.004-05:00

You've probably heard by now about a certain presumptuous jackass of a columnist named Jim Griffith who writes for the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald. Griffith has achieved 15 minutes of Internet infamy by penning a column entitled "A few religious thoughts to ponder." In it, he explains how terrible Thanksgiving is for atheists:

Thanksgiving must be a terrible time for atheists. They have no God to thank.

They do not have the privilege of gathering with family and friends to express gratitude by saying: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." An atheist on his deathbed faces serious uncertainties. Gazing upward, he pleads: "Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul -- if I have one."

The column was found out and replied to by a series of atheists objecting to such nonsense and, after less than two days, the newspaper saw fit to close the comments so that no more respondents could rake Griffith over the coals for being, as I said, a presumptuous jackass. I've checked other items in the newspaper, including other columns by Griffith, and none of them have had their comments closed after many days or weeks. Just this one. Apparently, the Newnan Times-Herald didn't want too many atheists to have the chance to debunk Griffith's garbage by mentioning how they celebrate Thanksgiving — at least not in a forum that locals were likely to see. It just won't do for a newspaper to report inadvertently that atheists celebrate the holiday in much the same way that non-atheists do and that the atheists are, after all, human beings with families, affections and gratitude. At least, it won't do for the small-time newspaper to reveal these truths to the residents of Newnan, GA.

As a result, those of us who didn't have the chance to respond to Jim Griffith's "few thoughts," which I suspect are a very few, at the paper's website during the 36 hours in which the opportunity to do so was available will have to do it elsewhere. I'll do it here.

I have a lot of things for which to be thankful this year, and not a single iota of it requires or has anything to do with any deities whatsoever.

Like many people across America, regardless of their beliefs, I will be joining my family to celebrate the holiday. LL and I will be leaving within the next couple of hours to head to north central Pennsylvania, just as we did last year. You may not see it readily, but there's a lot of gratitude embodied in that last sentence.

First off, I'm thankful for having gotten through another year during which a blindly religious president mismanaged the country in which I live into numerous hardships. I survived that year despite the existence of religious radicals in other countries who would like to see people like me dead... and when I say "people like me," I mean Americans. They want to inflict pain upon us because their religious fundamentalism calls for violence against people with whom they disagree. I'm thankful that this faith-stuffed anti-intellectual will soon be a former president and that his replacement might actually turn out to be a person of intelligence and ability who could wind up improving things, even if only a little. 2008 hasn't been a very good year for my country and I'm glad it's almost over. I'm thankful to the 7,000,000 people, too, who may well have changed the course of history during the last election. We shall see what really happens in the months and years ahead, but I'm thankful for at least having the hope that it won't be the same as what's gone before.

I'm thankful that I'm getting to spend another Thanksgiving with my sister, niece and brother-in-law. My sister and I had no contact at all for more than a decade, and this was in no small part due to religious belief. My parents found much to hate about the world and about differences of opinion and about people who are different from them thanks to their faith, you see, and they disowned first me in part because of that faith. They told my sister that I was a drug addict, that I was in jail and probably dead, to make as sure as they could that she wouldn't try to find me. When I finally tracked her down, I learned that she had been similarly disowned for the grievous sin of falling in love with someone of a different faith than that of our parents — even though neither my sister nor he practiced any religion at all. When they got married, nobody from my family came to the wedding other than myself. I gave the bride away. Tomorrow, we'll celebrate Thanksgiving together, along with my rather precocious niece and the rest of our non-traditional clan, none of whom are particularly religious and several of whom are outright non-believers. How could I not be grateful for this? The only involvement of a deity here, at least the imagining of one, was to drive people apart.

LL is coming with me, of course. This year, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary together. LL comes from a country in which religious differences led to a generation-long civil war in which members of her family and friends of her family died in terrible and inhumane ways. Her cousin, for example, was detained by a Syrian-backed militia, hauled away to Syria, and tortured for years. She spent long stretches of time huddled with her family in an underground parking garage hoping to avoid being shot or blown up by Syrians and Israelis and their proxies — all on the basis of ancient religious divisions. Survive it she did, though, and this year she became a US citizen and voted in an election for the first time in her entire life. I am thankful that LL is here with me, relatively safe and about to enjoy the holiday. I'm thankful that she survived a long and terrible war, that she made it to the US, and that she's stuck by me all these years, through the best of times and the not-so-good.

I'm thankful to the university I attend and to the people there who give of their time and knowledge as I grind away at earning a graduate degree. There was a time in my life, not so long ago, during which I never thought that I could get this far. I worked hard and here I am, but the opportunity had to be offered by others, too. I have that opportunity and am grateful for it.

I'm thankful that Tycho, a lizard who has practically been family, has survived another year, despite last year's unwarranted death sentence. He's sitting near my shoulder as I write this, probably wondering when breakfast is coming. Alas, the weather is too cold for Tycho to make the trip to Pennsylvania with us this year. He's going to be rather bored with no humans to entertain him for the four days we'll be gone. Tycho has worked out a lot of things in his long lizard lifetime, but how to work the TV remote isn't one of them. I expect that he'll spend much of his time asleep. In any case, he's exceeded the average lifetime of a member of his species in captivity by nearly a third now and is still in good health. Thank you, Tycho, for sticking around for so long. There will be lobster roaches and macaroni and cheese when we return. I suppose someone could argue that some deity is allowing Tycho to go on living. You know, Lizard-Jesus or HerpAllah or something. That would be a very childish person, but I'm sure someone who will read this will have the thought cross their mind.

Which brings me to another bunch for which I'm thankful, and that is the many people who have fought and are still fighting to reverse the ever-threatening flood of irrationality that might otherwise engulf us all and snuff out the light of the Enlightenment. They keep us progressing, sometimes at great cost. They're the ones who hope to remove the motivations for these religious wars and faith-based familial decay, who object to and dissect and defeat all the magical thinking that is only a hair's breadth away from complete ascendancy at times. I'm grateful to the teachers, the scientists, the historians, the living human memory-banks who remember the past and dedicate themselves to our not repeating it.

There is more — much more — but I have to get ready now to hit the road. It's a long drive from here to there. All things considered, I'm thankful to be making that six hour schlep today.

And you know what, Jim Griffith of the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald? I'm even grateful to you today. You've given me one more reminder of how low we humans can sink if we decide to measure the worth of others with yardsticks designed and built of our own narrow views. You're a good cautionary example of just how wrong we can be, and thus how wrong whole societies can go, when our eyes get so full of our own self-esteem that we place ourselves in judgment of the rest of the world based on nothing but the desire to be thankful to anything other than that little fraction of humanity it is our privilege, and sometimes our burden, to actually know.

Like the majority of Americans, I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving with a ridiculously large meal on Thursday evening. Like those millions of other Americans, there's something else I'll be doing early on Friday morning. It's then that I will be thinking most of Mr. Griffith.

Gel of the Day: FAIL

2008-11-25T22:52:00.003-05:00

My new primers didn't work. At all.

Bleah.

Matt Schubert and PDN: True Friends to Mycophiles

2008-11-25T19:03:00.004-05:00

Kudos to the Washington North Olympic Peninsula's Peninsula Daily News and especially sportswriter Matt Schubert for their service in helping to spread the word about the ever-fascinating fungi. The newspaper sponsored a mushroom contest, organized by Schubert, with prizes awarded in three categories. It resulted in folks being exposed to some amazing (and often tasty) organisms that they might never have otherwise heard of.

Prize-winning fungus among us -- results of the PDN's mushroom contest

By Matt Schubert

FUNGI GENERALLY TAKE a back seat to the North Olympic Peninsula's other treasures.

Some might even say mushrooms aren't getting their just due around these parts...

...fungi, of which the Pacific Northwest has approximately 3,000 different species, receive little in the way of love...

Regardless of the cause, it's plain to see that there just isn't enough honest public discussion about the fungus among us. That's why we here at the PDN decided to shed a little light on the subject.

At the behest of Publisher John Brewer, a fungus fan if I've ever seen one, yours truly put together "Mushroom Mania," a contest that merged my keen use of alliteration with the Peninsula's secretive fondness for fungi...

There were three categories created for Mushroom Mania: ugliest, largest and mushroom most resembling a landmark...

Largest mushroom:... Forks resident Gene Barker found his 10-pound cauliflower mushroom near the South Fork Hoh River. It was so big it couldn't fit into his five-gallon bucket.

Ugliest mushroom... your winner is the Lobster mushroom (aka Hypomyces lactifluorum), which isn't exactly winning any beauty contests itself.

Landmark mushroom -- For whatever reason, this one didn't inspire a whole lot of interest. It did, however, produce the oddest submission of the entire contest from Port Angeles' Jim Taylor.

Taylor claimed that his mushroom, called a "puffball," resembled Dolly Parton's chest, which he said is "a true national landmark." I found that to be a bit of a stretch.

Therefore, I decided to go with another Billeaudeaux submission, this time from Olympic Peninsula Mycological Society president Bobbi Billeaudeaux.

It was a Boletus edulis (aka King Bolete), which happens to look a lot like the Seattle Space Needle.

Fungi really don't get enough love in most quarters, which is too bad. It's good to see some people out there remedying that situation. And as for you, Gene Barker of Forks, WA (should you happen to find your way to this entry) I hope that Sparassis crispa of yours was tasty. And, yeah, I'm a little jealous.

Florida Judge Rules Ban on Gay Adoption Unconstitutional: Reason Draws a Breath

2008-11-25T16:49:00.004-05:00

There are moments when something like reason still manages to push its head above the floodwaters of fear and superstition and bigotry. Things change because sooner or later reason stops drowning and starts swimming.

Such a moment happened in a courtroom in Miami, Florida this morning. A circuit judge ruled the state's ban on adoption by homosexuals unconstitutional precisely because it is unreasonable to deny a right or privilege to one group that is granted to another if there is no sound, rational or — dare I write the word! — scientific reason for doing so.

Judge in Miami Rules Florida Ban on Gay Adoption Unconstitutional

By Amanda Ruggeri

A 1977 Florida state law that bans gay individuals from adopting has received its biggest challenge thus far: Foster father Frank Martin Gill won his suit to adopt two brothers he has been fostering since 2004...

In her decision this morning, Miami Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman ruled that there was no "rational basis" to prevent the children from being adopted. The case, which marks the first time that a gay adoption case has been taken before a trial court in Florida, seems likely to go before the Florida Supreme Court, which could overturn the ban.

Although several states have de facto bans against gay couples adopting and an unknown number of conservative-leaning courts make it virtually impossible, Florida is the only state that prohibits gay individuals from adopting...

...In one successful case earlier this fall in Key West, a judge ruled that the ban was unconstitutional and arose from "unveiled expressions of bigotry." But that case's legal effects were limited.

The Gill case, however, could have wide-reaching consequences. This morning's decision has already been appealed by the state. If the appellate court upholds the ruling that the law is unconstitutional, which seems probable, then the case is likely to go up to Florida's Supreme Court. Even if the appellate court reverses the ruling, the Supreme Court still has the option to hear the case. And if the Supreme Court agrees to reverse the law, that would strike the ban down statewide—without having to go through the state legislature...

...The state's defenders argued that gay people are more prone to a host of problems, ranging from alcohol and drug abuse to depression. Experts on the other side testified that while gays as a group do struggle more with particular issues, so do other demographic groups—but they're not banned from adoption, because adoption is meant to be decided on a case-by-case basis, rather than with group generalizations. Meanwhile, no credible scientific study has shown that the children of gay parents are at more of a disadvantage than the children of straight parents, they said...

Perhaps it's putting the cart before the horse to maintain that gay people are "more prone" to depression and related symptoms than straight ones, no? Perhaps that depression arises from the fact that they don't have the hope of ever being able to get married, to adopt a child that they've cared for, to not be discriminated against. I don't know how the depression rate among homosexuals compares to that among heterosexuals, but if it is higher, maybe not treating them like second-class citizens could change that. I'm sure the same things that apply to same-sex oriented people could be applied to other groups throughout history that have received the same sort of treatment. American Indians, African Americans, and many immigrant demographics have had the same problem and responded in the same way. Some still are.

I think, or at least I like to believe, that things are changing and that in the end the light of reason and compassion is going to win the day. I still believe there's that much good to hope for out of fellow human beings. If there isn't, as a well-known gay man once said, "If it's not love then it's the bomb that will bring us together."

Ann Coulter's Jaw Wired Shut

2008-11-25T15:38:00.004-05:00

Wow... I'm actually having a crisis of non-faith over this one.

It seems that Ann Coulter had a little accident and, as a result, has had her jaw wired shut.

Notably, none of the people who like blaming painful events upon divine retribution against liberals, pagans, homosexuals, etc., have come forward to state that Ann Coulter has been given the back of the invisible hand.

Still, I think we can all be grateful that the world has become less shrill for a few weeks.

"Blaspheme" While You Still Can

2008-11-25T14:40:00.002-05:00

By a vote of 85 to 50, with 42 abstaining, the UN General Assembly today adopted a draft resolution calling on all countries to alter their legal and constitutional systems to prevent "defamation of religions," asserting that "Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism."

The decision, sponsored by Islamic states with the support of Venezuela and Belarus, drew immediate protests from human rights activists and legal experts...
— Source

The thing is, Islam is associated with human rights violations and terrorism. So, for that matter, are Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism and every other religion one can name. There are also atheists and agnostics who commit acts of violence and violate human rights. Religions tend to foster such things when they become the basis of civil law because religions themselves preserve archaic ideas and practices which, in the light of reason, become obviously barbaric and inhumane. When any system commits atrocities it should be called out for doing so.

Even though this resolution is non-binding, it paves the way for others that will, without doubt, provide justification for the suppression of dissent from both theology and theocracy.

Jesus, Allah, Jehovah, Vishnu, whatever... all just stories, all just impotent puffs of human fear of the unknown, all just excuses to impose a way of life on others by cloaking it in the syrupy nonsense of doing it for the good of the other. If an omhipotent being existed and didn't want dissent and, yes, blasphemy to exist, then they wouldn't. This is just another example of the deep-down epiphany that nearly all true-believers have sooner or later that their deity of choice is incapable of defending itself, and so they must step in on behalf of the gods that aren't there to punish those who would point out that the emperor has no clothes.

You know what happens when you blaspheme like crazy and no human intervenes on behalf of a deity? Absolutely nothing.

No deity that needs the protection of its worshipers is fit for worship.

Fuck Allah, screw Jesus, jigger Jehovah, bugger Buddha, violate Vishnu where the sun don't shine and, most of all, the UN General Assemble can take its pious nonsense and cram it hard. I'd rather sit in prison or have a bullet in me than be silenced on behalf of a magical spirit that some schmuck clings to in order to impose his will on the world by fear.

Don't want people to connect your religion to violence and terrorism? Stop the religious from committing violence and terrorism. Can't do it? Your god won't do it? Guess what; your religion either doesn't work or else works precisely to foster violations of human rights and human dignity. Silencing, or even shooting, the messenger who points it out doesn't change the flawed nature of the dogma in which you have misplaced your faith.

Jack Szostak Seminar in Worcester, December 4

2008-11-25T11:22:00.004-05:00

Prominent abiogenesis researcher Jack Szostack will be presenting a seminar in Worcester on Thursday, December 4 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School as part of the Program in Molecular Medicine Series. The seminar, entitled "What can we Learn About the Origin of Life from Efforts to Design an Artificial Cell?", will begin at 11:00 AM. More info at the PMM Upcoming Seminars page.

If you haven't heard or don't remember, Szostack recently published a paper in Nature regarding his team's creation of protocells from non-living, simple organic chemicals that are capable of reproducing themselves, potentially recapitulating one of the earliest steps in the origin of life as we know it. I blogged a bit about it in June. Szostack's work represents a milestone in our understanding of how living things might well have gotten their start, and I expect that his talk will be tremendously interesting and informative to those of us interested in how it all began.

Now, the tricky part for me is that I'm supposed to be teaching lab on that day. Still, I should be able to get back in time to prep. This is a seminar I don't want to miss!

Wild Mushroom Eaten: Retiboletus ornatipes

2008-11-25T07:19:00.005-05:00

Last night, I added another wild mushroom to the ever-growing list of those I've eaten. This latest one was Retiboletus ornatipes, which I collected at Wachusett Mountain in August under beech and birch and had preserved by dehydration.

LL prepared the mushrooms in marsala wine and used them as sauce for pollack. The consistency was good; they held up well to cooking. The flavor wasn't bad. It isn't particularly strong, like a milder version of porcini, with a distinctively bolete flavor. There was a slightly bitter aftertaste at first but which diminished after I'd eaten more of the mushrooms.

I would rank R. ornatipes as a fair edible mushroom. It's better than some I've had, and a notch or two above Agaricus bisporus "supermarket" mushrooms, but nowhere near the top of my list. Nonetheless, it's one I would recommend trying to someone who wasn't quite as ~~spoiled~~ experienced as I am.

A small aside; many people still refer to this mushroom as Boletus ornatipes. The person who confirmed my identification, however, was one of the authors on a 2002 paper that reclassified it into the new genus Retiboletus. I often mention that one should never consume wild mushrooms without certainty of their identity, and even though there's no such thing as a lethal bolete, that rule still applies! Having someone with the depth of knowledge of my colleague provides a great measure of confidence in the matter. I've been a little reticent about consuming boletes since I misidentified one years ago, the only instance in which I've ever poisoned myself. As not everyone has access to an expert, though, there are luckily some resources available in books and online to help with identification. Michael Kuo provides one such resource at MushroomExpert.com; here's his identification page for R. ornatipes (he still uses the old nomenclature, but it's the same mushroom). If you're using a book or web page to identify a mushroom, go through all of the characters used to make sure that you're not making the mistake I did that led to 24 truly miserable hours suffering mushroom toxicity!

Laughing on Monday Morning

2008-11-24T05:18:00.004-05:00

— Source: Engrish.com

Don't eat the miscellaneous food.

LL Explains: Cloning Copernicus is a Bad Idea

2008-11-23T06:31:00.008-05:00

LL got back from Tallahassee last night. One of the things I miss most when she's away is our morning conversation over coffee. She comes up with the most insightful things sometimes. Sometimes, I just have to write them down.

LL: If I get inspired and motivated today, I might put up the new curtains.
Me: Well, here's something inspiring. Did you hear that they found Copernicus?
LL:: I did! That's really cool.
Me:: Now that they've found him, they can bring him back. Maybe they'll clone him like they're talking about doing with the mammoth.
LL: If they brought Copernicus back, do you think he could get anything accomplished with the Internet?
Me: The Internet? Huh?
LL: They'd think he'd do all this great stuff with the Internet, but he'd probably wind up looking at porn all day.
Me: Ummm... well... maybe...
LL: He'd click on all the pop ups, too. He'd get viruses all over the net.
Me: So Copernicus would destroy the Internet?
LL: Yeah, and then everybody would hate him and I'd never finish my dissertation, too.

It all makes perfect sense.

Blog Toy: What Type of Blog is Hyphoid Logic?

2008-11-22T10:55:00.004-05:00

I read about a blog toy courtesy of Dispatches from the Culture Wars called Typealyzer. It purports to analyze the dominant style of a given blog and tell you a little something about both that blog and its author.

I plugged in the URL for Hyphoid Logic and got the following result:

The analysis indicates that the author of http://vyoma108.blogspot.com is of the type:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

All of which is, I think, close to the truth. When I was interviewed by Bruce Berman for an article he's writing about the impact of science bloggers on the evolution/intelligent design "controversy," he told me something very similar to what that last sentence says, although he used the more accurate "not gentle," a characterization with which I fully agree. I don't try to be most of the time, particularly when it comes to confronting those who wish to substitute superstition for reason. The way I see it, someone else declared a "culture war" and decided that I'm part of the opposing "army." Who ever heard of a gentle war?

I have no idea of how this particular blog toy works, and Ed Brayton notes that it calls him "hardworking" whereas he sees himself as potentially "the laziest human being on the planet." I'm not so sure about that. Whatever the reason, Typealyzer seems to have me fairly well sussed. Give it a try for your own blog and see what it has to say.

That concludes today's navel-gazing session.

Rancho Cucamonga Censors Atheist Billboard

2008-11-22T06:50:00.002-05:00

The city government of Rancho Cucamonga, California (population: about 127,000) pressured the General Outdoor sign company to remove an "Imagine No Religion" billboard after receiving 90 complaints about it.

SoCal's atheist billboard taken down

Complaints have led to removal of an atheist group's "Imagine No Religion" billboard in Rancho Cucamonga.

The General Outdoor sign company took down the Freedom From Religion Foundation billboard on Thursday after the city asked if there was a way to get it removed. Redevelopment director Linda Daniels says they got 90 complaints...

Foundation co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor says the city shouldn't be censoring speech...

Gaylor is 100% correct; there is absolutely no good argument for removing the sign. If the billboard had been an advertisement for McDonald's and 90 people concerned with juvenile obesity had requested it be taken down, they almost certainly have been ignored and dismissed as cranks. As the sign dissented from a belief in sky-pixies, though, a small number of complaints from true-believers was enough to give the city's government an excuse to exercise censorship.

There's more from the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin:

Freedom of speech in question as Rancho Cucamonga asks company to take sign down

By Wendy Leung

...Gaylor said sign companies have declined business before, but no company has taken down a sign after it went up...

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said the city's actions are "dangerously close" to censorship and a violation of the First Amendment.

"A city government has no business trying to dictate or influence the content of an advertising image, particularly one that's political and controversial as this is simply because some people don't like it and complained about it," Scheer said. "The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect speech that is unpopular, to protect the views that are in the political minority, as long as they don't cross the line and use the speech for some seriously unlawful purpose, which clearly did not happen here."

Scheer said the city may not have forced General Outdoor to take down the sign, but it's obvious the company did not act independently.

Again, that's exactly right. The sign was in no way obscene. Controversy alone, the mere fact that some people disagree with the billboard's message, is not a legitimate reason for a city government to step in and "request" it's removal.

The City of Rancho Cucamonga's Redevelopment Agency website provides the following contact information:

Rancho Cucamonga Redevelopment Agency
10500 Civic Center Drive
Rancho Cucamonga, CA. 91730
1-877-5-Rancho
Director Linda Daniels: Linda.Daniels@CityofRC.us
Whether or not you agree with the opinion expressed by the billboard, there can be no doubt that the interference of Linda Daniels constitutes censorship and a clear breach of free speech. She shouldn't get away with it.

Could Marijuana Protect Short Term Memory in Aging Brains?

2008-11-22T06:09:00.000-05:00

Current research being done at the University of Ohio seems to indicate that specific compounds found in marijuana could protect short-term memory in the brains of older mammals — at least rats. A synthetic analog of tetrahydrocannabinol may act on brain cells in the hippocampus, a brain structure responsible for short-term memory, to prompt generation of new cells and reduce inflammation that interferes with normal functioning. The trick is that once impairment has already begun, it can't be reversed.

Scientists are high on idea that marijuana reduces memory impairment

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The more research they do, the more evidence Ohio State University scientists find that specific elements of marijuana can be good for the aging brain by reducing inflammation there and possibly even stimulating the formation of new brain cells.

The research suggests that the development of a legal drug that contains certain properties similar to those in marijuana might help prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Though the exact cause of Alzheimer's remains unknown, chronic inflammation in the brain is believed to contribute to memory impairment.

Any new drug's properties would resemble those of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive substance in the cannabis plant, but would not share its high-producing effects. THC joins nicotine, alcohol and caffeine as agents that, in moderation, have shown some protection against inflammation in the brain that might translate to better memory late in life.

"It's not that everything immoral is good for the brain. It's just that there are some substances that millions of people for thousands of years have used in billions of doses, and we're noticing there's a little signal above all the noise," said Gary Wenk, professor of psychology at Ohio State and principal investigator on the research.

Wenk's work has already shown that a THC-like synthetic drug can improve memory in animals. Now his team is trying to find out exactly how it works in the brain.

Immoral? What makes getting high immoral?

"When we're young, we reproduce neurons and our memory works fine. When we age, the process slows down, so we have a decrease in new cell formation in normal aging. You need those cells to come back and help form new memories, and we found that this THC-like agent can influence creation of those cells," said Yannick Marchalant, a study coauthor and research assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State...

"Could people smoke marijuana to prevent Alzheimer's disease if the disease is in their family? We're not saying that, but it might actually work. What we are saying is it appears that a safe, legal substance that mimics those important properties of marijuana can work on receptors in the brain to prevent memory impairments in aging. So that's really hopeful," Wenk said.

Wait... if it might work to simply use the real thing, why not just let 'em do it? Why do we need to develop a synthetic drug that will undoubtedly cost a lot more? If it's the smoking part (after all, inhaling particulate matter is never a good idea) that's bad, make brownies. Sugar-free, low-fat and loaded up up omega 3 oils, of course. Wouldn't some healthy pot brownies be more affordable than pills?

Personal note: Alzheimer's doesn't run in my family. I think I've had only one relative, my great-grandmother, who contracted it at all, and she got it so late in life that she passed away before it ever advanced much. Not much personal interest in this development, in other words.

..the researchers also determined that WIN acts on receptors known as CB1 and CB2, leading to the generation of new brain cells – a process known as neurogenesis. Those results led the scientists to speculate that the combination of lowered inflammation and neurogenesis is the reason the rats' memory improved after treatment with WIN.

The researchers are continuing to study the endocannabinoid system's role in regulating inflammation and neuron development. They are trying to zero in on the receptors that must be activated to produce the most benefits from any newly developed drug.

What they already know is THC alone isn't the answer.

"The end goal is not to recommend the use of THC in humans to reduce Alzheimer's," Marchalant said. "We need to find exactly which receptors are most crucial, and ideally lead to the development of drugs that specifically activate those receptors. We hope a compound can be found that can target both inflammation and neurogenesis, which would be the most efficient way to produce the best effects."

Well heck, you guys are no fun.

It's ironic that one of the traditional gripes against marijuana is that it impairs short-term memory and here we are reading about how it protects it. I suspect the trade-off is between the stimulation of neurogenesis obtained from small doses of the active ingredient(s) and the intoxication brought about by massive dosage. It's just like alcohol, perhaps. Nobody forgets their Saturday night after having a beer or two, but downing a six pack or three might well impair short-term memory. Of course, I'm no neurobiologist. I just think it's a bit silly to bring morality into the question.

Maybe just saying no wasn't such a good idea after all. As with many things, perhaps moderation is the key to deriving benefit.

First Winter Cold

2008-11-21T10:47:00.004-05:00

I believe I have my first real winter cold. It started yesterday with a tickle in the throat when I woke up, but by the time I taught my first bio lab this had progressed to a sore throat and loss of voice. Three hours later my throat and voice were almost completely shot and a cough came on as well. By the time I finished my second biology lab section at around 8:30 PM, my throat was on fire and my voice completely shot.

This morning, I woke up at 3:30 with a pounding headache, a cough, a mild (100°) fever and an utterly raw throat. I've spent most of the day since in bed, which is where I plan on spending much of the rest of it as well.

This is what happens when one gets locked in a room with students for six hours every week, the temperature drops by about 30° in a single day, and sleep has been in short supply.

LL gets back from Florida tomorrow, having successfully defended her prospectus. I'm hoping to be in better shape by then. My other plans for the day include chicken broth and a couple of movies from Netflix. I should be getting Lucio Fulci's Beatrice Cenci and The Dead Pit today. And sleep, too. Nyquil is my friend.

Religion Does Not Make People Moral: Buddhist Edition

2008-11-20T11:29:00.003-05:00

I know it may seem that I pick on Christians, Muslims and Hindus when it comes to finding examples of how religion doesn't make people more moral, even those who are supposed to be deeply and dedicatedly religious. I wouldn't want you to think I'm biased, though.

So I'm sure those who think I make a special effort to go after members of the three religions above will be relieved to see that Buddhism doesn't make people moral, either. Even Buddhist monks can be conniving, thieving bastards.

Cambodian monk charged with raping British woman

A 17-year-old Cambodian monk was charged with raping a British woman while taking her on a tour of a mountain cave near his Buddhist temple, a court official said Thursday...

He has confessed to police that he raped her...

The woman told police the monk had offered to serve as her tour guide on a visit to a cave near the Buddhist temple where he lived and, once there, he threatened to kill her if she resisted his attack, Mey Chhengly said.

The monk also allegedly stole $55 and a cell phone from the woman, he said...

You see, sociopathic, criminal sons of bitches come in all religious flavors. Did this young thug commit his crimes because he is a Buddhist? No. Neither did being a Buddhist monk stop him from committing them.

Skeptics' Circle #100: Skeptics in Space

2008-11-20T11:01:00.003-05:00

The Skeptics' Circle convenes for the 100^th time today. This time, the skeptics have gathered aboard The Liberator in attempt to discern The Trouble With Orac.

Have the forces of woo finally fried the neurocircuitry of the keeper of Respectful Insolence? Will the Circle be destroyed? Can the universe be saved from an unchecked explosion of hypercredulity?

Tune in and find out!

Congratulations to the SC for achieving the century mark.

Non-Belief in America: A Rising Tide of Reason?

2008-11-20T08:24:00.002-05:00

I find a recent story in The Wall Street Journal encouraging (hyphal tip to Greater Worcester Humanists for the lead). It talks about the growth and emergence of the secular movement in the USA and the rather humorous, panicky attempts by religious extremists to push back against it.

Atheists Reach Out -- Just Don't Call It Proselytizing

Nonbelievers Think the Time Is Right to Better Organize Their Nonreligion and Swell the Membership; 'Reason's Greetings'

...During the past three years, membership has grown in local and national associations of nonbelievers. Books attacking faith as a delusion shot up best-seller lists. For the first time, the faithless even raised enough funds to hire a congressional lobbyist.

Building on that momentum, nonbelievers have begun a very public campaign to win broad acceptance. On billboards and bus ads, radio commercials and the Internet, atheists are coming forward to declare, quite simply: We're here. And we're just like you...

Not so fast, religious leaders respond. They point out that the vast majority of Americans believe in God. A poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life earlier this year found 71% of American adults are absolutely certain God -- or some sort of universal spirit -- exists, and a further 17% said they were fairly certain. Only 5% said flatly that they don't believe.

Atheists "are talking to a very small slice of the population," said Mathew Staver, a leading Christian conservative and law-school dean. "In some ways, they're really just talking to themselves..."

Of course Staver would say that. Staver says a lot of things that don't make much sense. As far as his being a "law-school dean," that's technically true... if you consider Liberty University a school instead of a religious indoctrination center. That's a hard case to make in light of their doctrinal statement and the statement of belief that all faculty there is required to sign, though.

In this case, Staver is twisting facts to suit his argument when he says "only" 5%. Even if that figure were true, 5% is not an insubstantial number of people. To put it in context, the Pew Forum's most recent U.S. Religious Landscape Survey shows that only 1.7% of the population follows Judaism and 1.7% is Mormon. Unless Staver wishes to argue that Jews and Mormons have no impact on the rest of America, that they are "really just talking to themselves," then the same can't be said about nonbelievers. I wonder how these other groups feel about Staver suggesting that they should be ignored?

Secularist groups say their membership began to surge in 2005, when Congress sought to prevent Terri Schiavo's husband from removing her feeding tube. Many new members said they hoped nonbelievers could serve as a counterweight to religious influence in political affairs...

Bingo. As is noted later in this article, the rational community is by no means homogeneous and, by its very nature, is not particularly prone to organizational efforts for that reason. Still, the increasing stranglehold of those who believe that their religion should serve as the blueprint for law over political discourse in this country has served as a goad for nonbelievers to put aside differences and come together to push back against the American shariah movement. We can have rational arguments about those areas of disagreement later; they're just not as important in light of a much greater challenge. To do otherwise is tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Rather than renew old battles, such as the symbolic fight to remove "In God We Trust" from currency, members are mobilizing to repair what they view as breaches of the wall between church and state -- such as federal funding for faith-based charities and teaching of intelligent design in science class. They believe many others sympathize with their views -- but are too timid to commit.

I have to admit that as much as I usually dislike having "In God We Trust" on currency, there's a certain irony to the slogan that I can enjoy during the current economic meltdown.

The new ad campaigns and other public-relations efforts are designed to raise comfort levels about atheism by making the point that nonbelievers are "just as ethical and moral as anyone else," said Lori Lipman Brown, who lobbies Congress on behalf of the Secular Coalition for America.

As Doug Krueger, a philosophy professor in northwest Arkansas, put it: "Step one is for people to know we're not crazy, we're just regular people [who have] perfectly satisfactory lives without believing in God."

There's an irony, too, in the necessity for people who don't believe in an invisible, omnipotent being and its winged, praise-singing minions to demonstrate that they aren't crazy while belief in divine intervention and incorporeal evil spirits is the norm. Sarah Palin can talk about an immaterial divine hand "opening doors" for her to "plow through" and much of America nods its head in agreement that such things happen, but if we contend that no bearded man from a parallel dimension provides opportunities, that we humans are responsible for the state of our own and one another's lives, we're a bunch of misfits!

So the American Humanist Association is spending $42,000 to plaster buses in Washington, D.C., with ads asking: "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake." FreeThoughtAction and its local affiliates have put up billboards all over the country asking: "Don't believe in God? You are not alone." Eight billboards are going up this month in Denver...

Organizers of such efforts generally say they aren't trying to evangelize. Instead, they say their goal is to make the public more comfortable with the concept of atheism and give fellow nonbelievers a sense of community.

In seeking the spotlight, the movement risks a backlash. Some Christians find the billboards deeply offensive, especially at this time of year. In recent weeks, press releases from the religious right have accused atheists of "mocking" and "insulting" Christmas. In rural Chambersburg, Pa., one Christian group responded to an "Imagine No Religion" billboard with a giant sign of their own, asking: "Why Do Atheists Hate America?"

Ah, there's the humorous part. It hearkens back to the days of 2003, when 83% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq and those of us who thought it a bad idea were confronted with that stupid question, "Why do you hate America?" If any empty-headed question is symbolic of blind faith, of going along with the crowd simply because it's the majority, that's the one. And just as we in that 17% minority spoke our minds then not because we hated America but because we hoped to steer it away from a direction we thought bad for it, those of us in the 5% that Staver insists is talking to itself are trying to change the course of America toward one that leads to greater reason, to policy based on empirical reality rather than wishful thinking, and to a better future in general. It has nothing to do with hating anything, whether it's a religion or a country, and everything to do with simply being rational. If we have to organize to do that, if we have to reach out to others who have no connection to other nonbelievers in their own localities, so be it.

Still, leading activists say nonbelievers tend to be just as wary of organized atheism as they are of organized religion -- making it tough to pull together a cohesive movement.

"A pastor can say to his flock, 'All rise,' and everyone rises. But try that in an atheist meeting," said Marvin Straus, co-founder of an atheist group in Boulder, Colo. "A third of the people will rise. A third will tell you to go to hell. And a third will start arguing....That's why it's hard to say where we're going as a movement."

No kidding! Independent thought doesn't necessarily lead to agreement; it often results in the opposite. Aside from the core idea behind secular thought — that theology shouldn't be the basis for policies that affect the lives of all Americans — there's plenty of disagreement and debate about the particulars and priorities beyond. That very debate, though, is what reason should encourage. It's how a society learns, changes and progresses. If you find ten nonbelievers in a room agreeing with one another about some aspect of social policy, you can bet that they've been in that room for at least a couple of hours and half of them will probably have exhausted their voices. The very fact that we can change our minds is a strength.

If the theocratically-inclined find this offensive, if they believe that their religions are under attack because we put up a billboard expressing dissent against it and offering some other way of thinking, too bad. It's going to keep happening and all indicators point to it becoming more widespread, not less. That's America for you, and that very freedom is one of the reasons that I, and other secularists, believe it's worth inciting the outrage of those who would take it away. It's a risk we're willing to take on behalf of our country.

Another High Cholesterol Daily Jesus

2008-11-20T04:08:00.002-05:00

The King of the Jews hates health food. Why else would he only manifest in high fat, high cholesterol food? This time around, it's the drippings from a melted chocolate cookie in Melton Mowbray, Leicester, UK:

Jesus' face in chocolate cookie

By Ben Truslove

...Lois Preira, of Ullswater Road, was enjoying a cookie and a cup of tea when she noticed a face in the melted chocolate on the plate.

She said: "I was enjoying the cookie and when I picked it up I saw a face. When I looked at, I immediately thought that's definitely the face of Jesus. It looked just like the Turin Shroud. I felt I had to keep the plate because nobody would believe me otherwise..."

I've seen the picture and I still don't believe Preira. Her "just like the Shroud of Turin" bit of melted chocolate looks a good deal more like a random lump of nothing than it does like a human face, let alone that of a mythical figure.

I wonder if there's a connection between sightings of Jesus and poor diet. Every time Christ shows up in food, it's bad food. Grilled cheese, french toast, cookies, Cheetos... it's never anything healthy. Jesus doesn't pop up in a salad, manifest in tofu or make himself known in a steamed vegetable plate. No, it's some kind of junk food.

Makes ya think. Are those with hardened arteries perhaps more likely to believe in this sort of thing? Reduced oxygen supply to the brain can produce some odd effects.

Catholic Bishop: Education is Ruining My Church

2008-11-19T15:02:00.003-05:00

Education is only a good thing when it doesn't lead people to question the authority and moral infallibility of the Pope and the Catholic Church according to British Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue. He admits that education has an upside, too, but asserts that it has a "dark side" when it comes to people coming to conclusions about empirical and social reality that disagrees with what a bunch of Latin-chanting clerics think those people ought to believe.

Educated Catholics have sown dissent and confusion in the Church, claims bishop

University-educated Catholics are to blame for the crisis in the Church and the growth of secularism, according to the bishop charged with tackling the decline in Mass attendance.

The Rt Rev Patrick O'Donoghue, the Bishop of Lancaster, has claimed that graduates are spreading scepticism and sowing dissent. Instead of following the Church's teaching they are "hedonistic", "selfish" and "egocentric", he said.

In particular, the bishop complained that influential Catholics in politics and the media were undermining the Church.

While not naming names, he suggested that such people had been compromised by their education, which he said had a "dark side, due to original sin"...

...every human endeavor has a dark side, due to original sin and concupiscence. In the case of education, we can see its distortion through the widespread dissemination of radical scepticism, positivism, utilitarianism and relativism.

"Taken together, these intellectual trends have resulted in a fragmented society that marginalizes God, with many people mistakenly thinking they can live happy and productive lives without him"...

He says that he supports Catholics receiving a university education, but urges they should be "better-equipped to challenge the erroneous thinking of their contemporaries"...

By erroneous he means "anything that doesn't agree with what we told you to believe," of course. O'Donoghue's contention is that the standard by which education should be judged is the extent to which it agrees with church doctrine.

The Bishop himself has a degree from Oxford, but apparently it's an MA in Agreeing with the Catholic Church. The sort of education that leads people to question their beliefs in an intellectually honest fashion, to hold them up to standards of evidence... well, that's just all wrong. A good, Catholic education should consist of rote memorization of Papal talking points.

Bishop O'Donoghue should go squat on a steeple. If that seems disrespectful, that's because it is. This man is nothing more than the Thought Police dressed up in a cassock, an enemy of reason, a stooge, a failure who found acceptance in a big, feudalistic organization that cloaks him with authority and demands it be respected — a sure sign that it shouldn't be.

Spot the Looney: Ralph Nader and Al Qaeda Say the Same Things

2008-11-19T09:22:00.003-05:00

It's time once again to play...

Spot the Looney!

A couple of weeks ago, Ralph Nader used the term "Uncle Tom" to describe Barack Obama. Today comes revelation of a new (still to be fully vetted) audio recording featuring Al Qaeda's #2 lunatic, Ayman al-Zawahri. In it, the fundamentalist blood-sucker inveighs against Obama, calling him a "house negro" and complaining that he isn't enough like Malcolm X.

In an audio message which appeared on militant Web sites Wednesday, al-Zawahri said that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X. He called Obama a "house negro."
— Source

Compare this to Nader's June 25, 2008 statements as well:

He wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician. He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he's coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner.

Ralph Nader should feel proud that he has found common ground with Al-Zawahri. Since it should be apparent to even Nader by now that he's never going to win any public office in the US, perhaps he should look into the possibility of becoming Al Qaeda's official consumer protection advocate. I hear some of the car bombs they're using are "unsafe at any speed."

Buh-bye, Ralph, and thanks for playing Spot the Looney!

Wooful Witch Employment Available in Sweden

2008-11-19T07:07:00.000-05:00

A Swedish purveyor of online and telephone witchy-woo has opportunities available for 20 witches/psychics/professional storytellers!

Häxriket i Norden, based in Åhus in southern Sweden, is currently seeking to place five witches each in four separate locations around the country, the Skånska Dagbladet newspaper reports.

According to the company's advertisement on a listing maintained by Sweden's Public Employment Agency (Arbetsförmedlingen), qualified candidates should be well-versed in "contact with the other side, runes, tarots, crystals, herbs, rituals, exorcism, meditation, personal coaching, and more".
— Source

Those are some high experience standards to meet! Runes, tarot and crystals, along with exorcism? Considering that an average human being weighs around 150 pounds, that seems like an awful lot of credulous nonsense to cram into such a small space.

But wait, there's more:

The job also requires having a fixed telephone line and an internet connection, as most of Häxriket's services are delivered online or over the phone at a cost of 19.90 kronor ($2.45) per minute.

Exorcism over the Internet! "The power of spam compels you! The power of spam compels you!" How many emails for penis-enlarging pills and fake Rolex watches can one demon take?

Sadly, the opportunities have been created by the firing of the last bunch of woo-peddlers. Their employer got rid of them because they got caught defrauding clients:

The sudden wave of new hires comes following an internal shake up at the company in which a number of Häxriket's former witches were let go for violating the telemarketing ethics code put in place by the Etiska Rådet för Betalteletjänster ('Trade Ethical Council for Telemarketing') – ERB...

"We've really cleaned house," said Qinna Blomgren, who refers to herself as the "top witch" and is partial owner of Häxriket, to the newspaper.

See, you have to be an honest liar to work as a phone witch, and if you get caught lying dishonestly, a "top witch" will turn you into an unemployed psychic. Poof.

Blomgren is quick to dismiss critics who question the legitimacy of Häxriket's operations.

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If I like cinnamon buns with cardamom, it doesn't mean that I can claim it's the only correct path," she said.

Well, there's an intelligent analogy, no?

Yes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I'm entitled to the opinion that there's nothing wrong with picking people's pockets, but it's still both dishonest and illegal. Using a telephone or the internet in conjunction with ignorance and superstition to pick people's pockets is still picking people's pockets, whether or not the "top witch" agrees that picking pockets should be a crime. Fraud is fraud, and fraud works best when both the one committing it and the one against whom it is committed buy into the scam. Any good con-man can tell you that. In fact, "top witch" Blomgren just did!

Transitional Fossils: This Time, It's a Turtle

2008-11-19T06:09:00.000-05:00

As much as I'm loathe to use a term like "transitional" in describing a fossil. After all, nearly all fossils are, in fact, transitional. Still, I'll use the word in this case because it should make the importance of this latest in a long series of "missing link" fossils clear to those many Creationists who insist that no such fossil evidence exists for evolution.

This time, researchers have found the fossilized remains of a 164 million year old turtle in Scotland. The turtle is the earliest known aquatic form but still bears many of the traits of completely terrestrial species. Dubbed Eileanchelys waldmani, the new species fills the "gap" between the heavy-boned terrestrial turtles known from Triassic Period and the aquatic forms known from the Jurassic.

Ancient turtle discovered on Skye
By James Morgan, Science reporter, BBC News

The 164 million-year-old reptile fossils were found on a beach in southern Skye, off the UK's west coast.

The new species forms a missing link between ancient terrestrial turtles and their modern, aquatic descendants.

The discovery of Eileanchelys waldmani... is reported in the Royal Society journals.

The turtles were found embedded in a block of rock at the bay of Cladach a'Ghlinne, on the Strathaird peninsula.

It contained four well-preserved turtle skeletons, and the remnants of at least two others...

The historic specimens are now being housed in the National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh.

They were uncovered by a team from London's Natural History Museum and University College London (UCL)...

"It is part of a new revision we are having about turtle evolution."

The new species helps bridge a 65 million-year gap in the story - between the terrestrial "basal" turtles, from the late Triassic, and the aquatic "crown-group" turtles of the late Jurassic.

The former were "heavy-built" land-dwellers, with skulls which were "more reptilian", says Mr Anquetin.

The latter were lighter, and closer in appearance to the aquatic, freshwater turtles we know today.

What happened in between was a mystery, until very recently.

In the last two years, fossils of three new turtle species, all dating to to the Middle Jurassic, have been discovered in Russia, Argentina, and now Scotland...

On the outside, E. waldmani would resemble a modern freshwater turtle - "like the ones you can buy in the pet shop", says Mr Anquetin...

"The differences are on the inside - in the cranial anatomy. They are small differences but very important. There is no other turtle like this one..."

Their findings are reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

"This new turtle is very exciting", said Dr Walter Joyce, an expert in turtle evolution, formerly of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University.

"Keep in mind that a 65 million year gap used to exist in the fossil record between the oldest known turtles from the Late Triassic and basically modern turtles in the Late Jurassic.

"The new turtle is really quite spectacular in preservation, considering that several complete skeletons are preserved, instead of the usual scrap that has to be pieced together..."

That God in the gaps must be very skinny to keep up with all of the shrinking going on. We get a new "transitional" fossil every few months. Dinosaur feathers, 52 million year old bat ancestors, fish/quadruped intermediates, frogamanders... the alleged gaps keep closing, the supposedly missing links keep turning up, and the paleontological evidence supporting various evolutionary theories mounts regularly.

Now, the real question: how long will it take antiscientific ignoramus Babu Ranganathan to come up with another angrily hand-waving spew denying that Eileanchelys exists?

Cheney, Gonzalez Indicted in Prison Scandal

2008-11-19T04:47:00.003-05:00

Indictments fly: Willacy County DA targets officials
By Emma Perez-Trevino, The Brownsville Herald

A Willacy County grand jury indicted several high-profile public officials on Monday including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr.

The indictment charges Cheney with illegally profiting, by virtue of his office, from $85 million in investments in the Vanguard Group. The group invests in companies that house federal detainees. He also is charged with exerting pressure on how much prisons are paid to house detainees.

For now, Cheney's office did not comment. "I haven't seen the indictment," Cheney's spokeswoman Megan Mitchell said Tuesday, indicating that it would be reviewed.

The indictment further alleges that Gonzales used his position to stop investigations into assaults committed in the private prison managed by the GEO Group in Willacy County.

The GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp., was also indicted on murder charges involving the 2001 death of an inmate killed in a Raymondville prison. The indictment accuses GEO of allowing inmates to beat Gregorio De La Rosa Jr., 33, of Laredo, to death with padlocks stuffed into socks...

No! Say it ain't so! Dick Cheney profiting from inhumanity? Alberto Gonzalez tied to torture? This is America. That kind of thing doesn't happen here. Oh, sure, maybe it happens in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Cuba, and maybe the occasional suspect is extraordinarily rendered to a secret prison or two somewhere in Eastern Europe to undergo procedures that are illegal on US soil, but it couldn't happen here.

Will this go anywhere? Will we ever see a Cheney perp walk? I doubt it. He'd have to be dug out of his undisclosed location first, and those sent to retrieve him would have to take care not to wind up being shot in the face. Still, it's fun to think about.

Yet More Grading

2008-11-18T15:07:00.003-05:00

Have I mentioned lately how much I dislike grading?

Having just finished the term papers for the lab section I teach, I'm now grading exams. I drew what is apparently a more difficult couple of problems this time around. I don't personally think they're too tough; it's just a two-parter asking students to write out the genotypes of a couple of fruit flies and then use a Punnet square to predict the genotypes, phenotypes and genders of their offspring.

There are a lot of very strange fruitflies being born from this mating, though. Extra chromosomes keep cropping up in some, whereas others are males lacking a Y chromosome. Still others are lacking genes for one of the two traits involved.

I dislike grading because I don't like to be a bearer of bad news, and there are a lot of students who are going to be getting some bad news when these exams are handed back in a few days. Of course, I also dislike grading because it keeps me out of the lab. I've had to order some new primers and they won't come until tomorrow, so that's not as big a deal at the moment. My goal, though, is to get these exam responses done with today so that I can at least do a little bit of bench work tomorrow in between my other commitments for the day.

I plan on once more going after the cox1 gene from Neomida bicornis with the new primers. That, however, is a story for another day. For now... its back to grading.

NOVA: "The Bible's Buried Secrets" Airs Tonight

2008-11-18T10:09:00.004-05:00

Don't forget, tonight's episode of NOVA is the long-anticipated "The Bible's Buried Secrets":

In this landmark two-hour special, NOVA takes viewers on a fascinating scientific journey that began 3,000 years ago and continues today. The film presents the latest archeological scholarship from the Holy Land to explore the beginnings of modern religion and the origins of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament.

This archeological detective story tackles some of the biggest questions in biblical studies: Where did the ancient Israelites come from? Who wrote the Bible, when, and why? How did the worship of one God—the foundation of modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—emerge?

"'The Bible's Buried Secrets' is both a scientific detective story and dramatic adventure that digs deeply into the Bible and the history of the ancient Israelites through the archeological artifacts they left behind," said Paula S. Apsell, NOVA Senior Executive Producer...
— Source

Readers may recall that this program has the American Family Association foaming at the mouth. In July, Don Wildmon declared jihad against PBS over it, urging his clusterflock to contact their congressional representation in protest and use this particular program as an example of why PBS should no longer receive public funding. The fundienutters are upset, you see, that the program uses scientific methods and reasoning in making the outrageous claims (if you're a fundamentalist religious true-believer with your head lodged firmly up your Dark Ages) that the Bible was written by numerous authors, that the stories are the continuations of pre-existing myths, that monotheism didn't spring into existence at the beginning of time, etc.

All of which is very good reason to watch the show and send a contribution to PBS in support of an effort to investigate reality instead of simply furthering superstition.

Baba Sushi: Overloud, Overpriced and Overrated (a Worcester Restaurant Review)

2008-11-18T07:22:00.005-05:00

After LL's talk last night, we decided to go out for some sushi and sake and unwind for a bit. Knowing that Baba Sushi (309 Park Ave., Worcester) had been voted the best sushi restaurant for 2008 by the readers of Worcester Magazine, it seemed like the place to go. Having now experienced it, I can only wonder why this place would top the list.

There was nothing wrong with the food. The fish was fresh and the presentation was nice. The place was packed, particularly considering that it was a Monday night. Then again, it doesn't take much to pack a place as small as Baba. There are six small tables shoehorned into an area about as large as a typical living room along with a sushi bar and another for drinks. We were seated at the last available table, and there was no more than a foot of space between ourselves and the diner at the next table.

The first thing we noticed was the noise level. Whether or not Baba Sushi is really the best sushi restaurant in town may be entirely subjective, but I have no doubt at all that it's the loudest. Much of the clientele appeared to be students from local campuses and those at the bar certainly had a few in them. The bartender was joining in with their revelry, and in such a small space the sound seemed to bounce off the walls and become amplified. Add to that the conversations of the diners and the nearly-constant ringing of cell phones, not to mention the more-than-adequate volume of the flamenco guitar music played over the speakers, and the sum is a cacophony so loud that carrying on a normal conversation was quite impossible. Everyone was shouting, it seemed. At times, the situation bordered on painful.

We were a bit taken aback by the pricing on Baba's menu. Sushi is often a bit pricey, but Baba's prices track toward the shameless in comparison to the many other restaurants of the same genre that I've been to, both in Worcester and in San Francisco. I never order the most expensive thing on the menu the first time that I go to a new restaurant. It's a practical thing; I get a less-expensive dish the first time rather than blow a bigger chunk of change on an expensive failure. LL and I decided to try the sushi and sashimi combination from the set menu, a chef's choice entree of 8 sushi and 12 sashimi ($36.00) and a carafe of sake ($15.00). Our waiter seemed disappointed by our choice. No, let me rephrase that. Our waiter disapproved of our choice and didn't mind questioning our judgment. Our impression was that we were being told that we simply weren't spending enough money; LL and I both were surprised by the pointed manner in which we were asked, "Is that all you're having?" I can't say that I recall ever being asked that question before.

At other sushi restaurants to which I've gone, a fixed menu entree is usually accompanied by miso soup and a small salad, so when our waiter asked if we wanted those items, we assented. At Baba, though, there is an extra charge for these things, so if you don't want to spend the extra money for them keep this in mind. The salad, a combination of seaweed and shredded daikon, was presented nicely in a blue martini glass but was nothing different from what I've had at any number of sushi restaurants previously and the miso soup was, well, miso soup. The small carafe of sake was, similarly, just like the hot sake one gets at sushi restaurants that don't have extensive wine lists. The difference is that it cost almost twice as much as it does at those other places.

When our entree arrived at our table, we were a little disappointed to find that the chef's choice in this case was to give us the most pedestrian of combinations. Both the sashimi and the sushi consisted entirely of maguro tuna, salmon and a white fish that I suspect was mackerel even though the last is not on the menu. There was no variety here, and while the fish was fresh, it was nothing particularly interesting. The presentation of the entree wasn't bad, but it wasn't brilliant, either. It was, in short, like any other sit-down sushi restaurant I've ever been to.

After the main course, I ordered 2 pieces of tobiko sushi, a favorite of mine. The small portions of flying fish roe were served in a thick seaweed wrapper which, in turn, was warmed up a bit. This was a nice touch, perhaps the only one we witnessed during our visit. There was nothing about our meal, certainly, that made up for the terrifically noisy, crowded conditions nor the slightly grungy physical environment.

All in all, LL and I agreed that we won't be going back to Baba. It's not our kind of place and, to our thinking, not at all worth the prices charged. We can get the same food for less at Sakura Tokyo, which is far more spacious, cleaner, and quieter than Baba, not to mention lacking the general attitude from a snooty waiter with which our order was taken.

I don't know the mechanics of Baba's winning accolades from WoMag's readers worked, but I can't say that I found any reason to agree with their award.

LL's Talk and the AV Meltdown

2008-11-18T06:51:00.003-05:00

LL's talk at Holy Cross was well-attended last night. About 60 people showed up, including students and faculty. The chairs or directors of the Anthropology, Women's and Gender Studies, and African Studies departments and programs all came. Her presentation was well-received, eliciting a number of questions from the audience as well as complements from faculty members afterward. As a sort of preliminary job talk, it seemed to go well.

Any success, however, was muted a bit by a negligent audio-video technician. After initially setting up for the presentation, this student worker (I think his name was Lowell) disappeared. Everything was working when he left, but shortly before LL's talk was to begin, the podium microphone stopped working. So did the audio linked to her laptop. She had to give her presentation without the benefit of voice amplification. She also spent hours working on English subtitles for African music video and film clips that address the subject of FGM, but despite having tested them on the system to be used for the presentation there was no audio for two of the clips and the third one wouldn't play at all. As the central theme of her talk revolved around the use of popular culture media in Africa by Africans in their growing resistance to the practice of FGM, this was more than a little bit of a problem. Despite several people trying to get things working, nobody could figure out how to do it. LL got flustered but managed to soldier on through the presentation.

We found out afterward from a couple of other faculty members that the room in which LL spoke frequently has AV problems. I'd go so far as to say that it's notoriously problematic for creating problems for speakers. Why the AV guy would decide to disappear like he did makes no sense. I suppose he just didn't care; he must have had better things to do than to stick around and keep things in working order. As LL put it to me just now when I told her I was writing about this today, "Lowell needs his ass kicked." I'm sure she means that metaphorically.

Nonetheless, the reception afterward was quite nice. LL had the chance to speak at length with several faculty leaders and I got the opportunity to have a talk with Shawn Maurer, Director of Women's and Gender Studies. We swapped stories about going to school in the south (she did her PhD in Texas) and the culture wars. It turns out that her husband is a friend of Jerry Coyne's, too.

In any case, from what I overheard and what she told me afterward, it sounds like LL's talk went over quite well with people important in terms of her getting the tenure-track spot in Anthropology. The chair of the department mentioned that only a dozen or so people show up for presentations, so having something like five times that number come out can only be a positive. We're keeping our fingers crossed.

This morning, LL is off to Florida to defend her prospectus before her committee at FSU. I think she's going to be very glad when this week is over.

LL's FGM Talk is in One Hour

2008-11-17T15:32:00.003-05:00

In just one hour from now, LL will be giving the single greatest talk on female genital mutilation ever given in the history of mankind. If you're within an hour of Worcester, MA and you miss it, you have nobody to blame but yourself. When all your Wormtown co-workers are talking about resistance to FGM in African culture around the water cooler tomorrow, you'll have nothing good to say about it.

You don't want to miss this. You just don't. Get thee hence to Smith Hall on the campus of the College of the Holy Cross!

Monumental: Royal Society Digital Archives Free Until 2/1/09

2008-11-17T10:55:00.002-05:00

The entire archives of the Royal Society, dating back to 1655, have been digitized and put online. Best of all, they're free until February 1, 2009. FREE. Anyone who wants anything from this huge archive, essentially representing the history of science since the dawn of the Enlightenment, can get whatever they want for nothing, nada, zip.

This is a huge deal. Access to the Royal Society's archives is not cheap. I suggest that you start searching the archives for whatever it is that interests you and downloading it. I know that I am.

Go to the Royal Society journals and get your hands on everything you can!

A Macrocybe-sized hyphal tip to Aydin Örstan of Snail's Tales for the news!

After the Election: Symptoms of an American Pathology

2008-11-17T07:39:00.002-05:00

With all of the joyful noise following the last Presidential election,it's sad to have to be reminded that there's still an old sickness in our cultural body that is yet to be cured. Still, it doesn't come as a surprise. Months before the election, the purveyors of hatred were already making their voices heard. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the threats have kept on coming and have gone beyond words to action in some cases. Now that America will have its first president whose skin isn't pinky-beige, whose hair looks a bit different than the Caucasian type, whose father was an African, the venom is ratcheting up.

There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

Some of the incidents tracked include:

...Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door...
Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: "Let's shoot that nigger in the head..."
At Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written "Let's hope someone wins."
Racist graffiti was found in places including New York's Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted
Kilgore, Texas, where the local high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.
Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.
University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur...
Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported...
Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.
A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted 'Obama.'
In Forest Hills, PA, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his car windshield, saying "now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house."
— Source

From sea to shining sea, indeed.

It would be naive to even ask why this is happening. We all know why. The pathology has been around long enough. One might as well ask what causes the common cold or why the sky is blue. There are people in this country who, having accomplished nothing with their own lives, identify their own value — and by extension the value of other human beings — by some easily distinguishable physical trait, some bit of superficial biological coincidence. It's all they've got, and they'll cling to it for all they're worth because it is all they're worth. Call that bit of inconsequential physicality into question and you call their value as a human being into question. You make an enemy who may well take it upon himself to extract vengeance.

That someone who looks different, who doesn't share some valued hue of the flesh with such people, has achieved the nation's highest political office drives such people into a rage. Some meaningful privilege that they'd hoped and believed was connected with their appearance has turned out not to be so connected. It is for this reason that I expect at least one assassination attempt to be made upon Obama. It's a pathetic expectation, I know, but it would be just as naive not to think such an event will come as it is to question the motivation for it in the first place.

Sometimes I Wish I Believed in Hell

2008-11-13T07:17:00.004-05:00

Sometimes I wished that I believed in Hell so that I could also believe that there was a special place reserved in it for jackasses who scrawled swastikas on Holocaust memorials.

Sadly, it happened this time in San Francisco.

Swastikas deface S.F. Holocaust Memorial
Rachel Gordon, Chronicle Staff Writer

The Holocaust Memorial in San Francisco's Lincoln Park has been vandalized for the second time in two months with swastikas penned on the bronze sculpture in the latest incident that city officials learned of Wednesday...

"The Holocaust," as the haunting piece by sculptor George Segal is titled, is made up of 11 life-size figures cast in bronze and then painted white. The figures are positioned behind a barbed-wire fence...

A vandal or vandals used a black ink marker to deface one of the figures, some plaques related to the sculpture and a nearby bench. The markings were similar, with the swastika drawn inside the Jewish Star of David symbol.

Last month, a swastika was scratched into the surface of the artwork, commission officials said. It has been vandalized other times, as well. Police were alerted to the latest defacement Wednesday morning...

Because I don't believe in Hell, all I can hope for is that the morons who did this are caught and given the harshest possible sentence under the law for their cowardly and inhumane act. Well, I can hope that they fall into a vat of honey and stumble into a hive of angry Africanized bees, too, but that's not nearly as likely.

Aside from the sheer hatred for others involved in vandalizing a memorial to victims of mass murder, one has to wonder what the point of doing it is in the first place. It's going to get noticed, after all (otherwise, why do it in the first place?) and fixed immediately. Other than making people possessed of something approaching mental health think you're a blatant anal pore, such an act changes nothing. It's not like someone is going to see your handiwork and think, "Gee, maybe the guy who drew the swastika on the depiction of a Holocaust victim has a point. I think I'll become a Neo-Nazi."

Judge Jones Speaking at Framingham State College Next Week

2008-11-13T06:47:00.003-05:00

Framingham State College kicks off its Year of Darwin series next week with Judge John Jones, who will be speaking at the Dwight Performing Arts Center at 7:00 PM. Jones, you will recall, presided over the Dover, PA case (Kitzmiller v. Dover) in which the advocates of Intelligent Design Creationism were slapped upside their pointy little heads by the conservative Reagan appointee. Remember that one? The one where the Discovery Institute slinked away with its tail between its legs at the last minute and Michael Behe came off the witness stand smelling like a septic tank? Yeah, I thought you did.

Jones will, of course, be discussing the Dover case and why Intelligent Design isn't science. That's a week from today — November 30, 7:00 PM. Admission is a measly $5.

Future speakers in the series include Daniel Dennett (February 12) and Sean Carroll (March 31).

Mycological Consumer Fraud: Know Thy Shrooms, Dude

2008-11-13T06:32:00.000-05:00

Three men in New Hampshire have been arrested for reselling mushrooms they bought at the supermarket. The catch? They were using blue food coloring to make the ubiquitous Agaricus bisporus buttons look more like much more interesting Psilocybe mushroom. I'm not sure who they were going to fool with such a poorly conceived scam. While it's true that hallucinogenic Psilocybe mushrooms stain blue on at least some portion of the fruiting body when bruised, the two species look very different in a number of other ways. It's a bit like trying to pass off carnations as roses. Still, the geniuses did manage to sell $900 worth of their faux magic mushrooms to an undercover police officer in Kingston and have been arrested — and two of them still had the blue food coloring all over their hands.

Fungus fakeout: Three face drug charges
Jason Schreiber, Union Leader

KINGSTON – Three men accused of trying to sell fake hallucinogenic mushrooms have been caught blue-handed.

Police said the men were arrested after one of them sold a quarter-pound of mushrooms for $900 during an undercover drug probe. When police later pulled over the men, two had hands stained with blue food coloring.

Police Chief Donald Briggs Jr. said police believe the mushrooms were purchased at a grocery store along with the blue food coloring used to dye the mushrooms and make them appear more like a potent psilocybin mushroom...

Now really, how dumb were these guys?

I don't advocate the ingestion of Psilocybe mushrooms nor do I condemn it. If you want to suck down a bunch of fungal pesticide evolved to discourage arthropods from consuming the reproductive structure, that's entirely your own business. Mycologically speaking, I don't find Psilocybe a particularly interesting genus. Still, there's a danger to people who do this sort of thing because its entirely possible you could be buying something much more unsavory than Agaricus bisporus when you think you're get P. cubensis or somesuch.

In other words, if you really want some "shrooms, dude," know how to tell you're getting the right thing. As laughable as the clowns in this story are, they had some reason to believe that their scam would work and it's entirely possible that this isn't the first time they've done it. Somebody in New Hampshire, in other words, may have bought from them before and that fact opens up some troubling possibilities. Whatever silly legalities society's moral opposition to intoxication ends up imposing on them, I don't think many of us want to see someone seriously poisoned for such a crime. I don't even want people to get sick. There are some much more toxic common mushrooms out there which could be passed off as Psilocybe than can A. bisporus with a little food coloring. I could easily see some enterprising idiot doing this with an Enteloma, for instance, and certainly a Stropharia can pass for Psilocybe. Even mycologists have a hard time separating the two genera in a satisfying way.

Try this at home. What kind of mushroom is that to the left of this paragraph (click for a larger image)? Can you come up with a reasonable identification to genus? Do you have any idea whether or not it's edible, hallucinogenic or toxic? This is a relatively easy genus to identify, by the way, and the photo contains all of the characters one would need to figure out the genus for this one. Would you eat this?

The moral of the story is, Know Thy Mushroom. If you don't know how to identify a Psilocybe, you probably shouldn't be eating it. You could wind up ripped off by the blue-handed mushroom fakers... or worse. Much, much worse.

Skeptic vs. Cynic

2008-11-12T18:00:00.005-05:00

The difference between a skeptic and a cynic:

A skeptic treasures rationality and empirical evidence, wielding them as a razor to slice away at unfounded belief in an effort to improve the lives of others. A skeptic will deliver a long, detailed argument about facing reality in an effort to overcome ignorance.

A cynic treasures rationality and empirical evidence, wielding them as a cudgel in order to improve his comfort level with his own life, regardless of the impact upon the lives of others. A cynic will deliver a long, detailed argument about facing reality in an effort to overcome ignorance to your relatives as they gather around your deathbed. He's likely to have a cost-benefit analysis of your funeral arrangements in his pocket.

If mercy's a business, I wish it for you
And more than just ashes when your dreams come true.

LL Giving Talk About Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) at Holy Cross

2008-11-12T10:13:00.005-05:00

Yeah, I'm a little proud.

Female genital mutilation, also known as female genital cutting, FGC and FGM, is still practiced in some parts of the world. While a cultural practice, in some quarters it has inappropriately been attributed as a specifically Islamic practice. LL has been a leader and coordinator in changing this situation for years now. Among other activities, she is the director of the The Female Genital Cutting Education and Networking Project.

She's right here in Worcester, folks. Please consider coming out to her talk at Holy Cross on Monday, 11/17.

Same-Sex Marriages Begin in Connecticut Today: "No Big Deal"

2008-11-12T07:33:00.001-05:00

Beginning today, Connecticut joins Massachusetts as the second state in the US to issue licenses for same-sex marriages. Not civil unions or domestic partnerships or some other separate-but-equal concept, but full-on marriages. The overwhelming reaction in the state appears to be that it's no big deal.

Same-Sex Couples Can Obtain Marriage Licenses Today
By Daniela Altimari, The Hartford Courant

Connecticut begins issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples today, a historic milestone that gays and lesbians will celebrate and social conservatives will grieve.

Many others are likely to respond with a shrug.

"They could do what they want to do," said Karen Dowdell, a 61-year-old Hartford resident who was shopping at Corbins Corner in West Hartford Tuesday morning. "I could care less..."

...Citizens here have long displayed a distaste for the culture wars that have riven so much of the nation...

Same-sex marriage comes to Connecticut more than four years after it arrived in Massachusetts. Those first-in-the-nation gay weddings were met with a burst of hoopla. Reporters from as far as Japan came to cover the story...

Contrast that to Connecticut, where the gay rights coalition Love Makes a Family has received a smattering of calls from international media, "but nothing compared to what they received in Mass.," said Anne Stanback, the group's president...

Now, "at least in New England, it's becoming ... old hat," Stanback said. In fact, she added, for most people in Connecticut, same-sex marriage is "a big yawn..."

A big yawn? Well, yes, and that's exactly what it should be. Why should anyone care about what two consenting adults do in terms of their own relationship? It's nobody's business but their own. How many of us look through the marriage announcements in our local newspapers at all, let alone do so with any sense of either excitement or revulsion? If it weren't for the magical thinking of culture warriors who wish others to accept their strange, as-yet-unexplained notion that the effects of somebody else's marriage extend to the rest of the world, nobody would care about this. Even objections based in religion would, if they were statements of honest faith instead of bigotry given a cosmetic gloss of godliness, culminate with nothing more than a shrug and a "God will sort this out, so I'm not worried" sort of a statement.

See, that's the thing about equality. It's only exciting in the moments prior to and immediately after it is extended to some group that didn't previously have it. After that, it quickly becomes a pretty ho-hum situation. That's a good thing. That's what acceptance looks like. Sure, there may be a few radical racists who feel otherwise, but does anyone get revved up today over the fact that a vote cast by a black person in the USA is weighted equally with one cast by a Caucasian — a situation which was once made otherwise by nothing less than a Constitutional amendment? For the vast majority of people, this is just the way things are and we accept it, even though there were once movements as passionately for and against the arrangement we now take for granted and great celebration when it first changed.

So today, Connecticut will yawn a little and shrug a little and a few more people will enter into a situation that was previously prohibited to them. There will be the little, personal celebrations and a few more people will be happier than they were yesterday. The rest of the people will go on about their lives as if nothing had happened because it's not a big deal.

"No big deal" can be a wonderful phrase sometimes. This, I think, is one of them.

Loss and Consolation: The End of Binh Duong

2008-11-12T04:48:00.002-05:00

I am sorry to report that LL and I have suffered a loss. We were stunned to learn yesterday that our favorite Vietnamese restaurant, Binh Duong, is no more.

We'd found Binh Duong just over a year ago and it rapidly became our default restaurant. They had the best Vietnamese of anyplace we'd tried in town. Their seafood clay pot and their soups were uniquely spiced and reasonably priced. I lost count of how many times we'd eaten there. The last time my sister and her family were in town we took them there and they agreed, too, that it was the best Vietnamese that they'd ever had. The service was exceptional, too.

Sadly, LL and I decided to have lunch there yesterday before I dropped her off for her class. We were greeted by a "closed" sign. Gone. Instead, a new Vietnamese restaurant, called Diem Ha, is moving in "soon." No more Binh Duong. Truly, the good die young.

Our consolation prize was a cluster of shaggy mane mushrooms (Coprinus comatus) that I spotted from the car as we pulled out of the parking lot. It was growing in a planted area. I'd never collected shaggy manes before and am looking forward to trying them for the first time. Still, it's a small consolation for the loss of our favorite restaurant.

We stopped off at Pho Dakao instead, and the food there is good... but it's no Binh Duong. Diem Ha has some very big shoes to fill as far as we're concerned.

Gel of the Day: A Horny Little Bug That's Pissing Me Off

2008-11-11T14:16:00.005-05:00

Just for the record, I would like it known that the 3-4mm long diaperine beetles lumped together into the species Neomida bicornis are stinky stupid-heads and I don't want to play with them anymore.

What can I say after that deeply professional and scientific appraisal? Well, I can offer up this Gel of the Day as evidence of my contentions:

The first two lanes are 28S and 5.8S nuclear ribosomal subunits and the third is cox1 from Neomida bicornis. The last three are the same genes from a positive control, Bolitotherus cornutus. Everything else is, of course, the same. The same aliquots of primers, the same Taq polymerase, the same dNTPs, the same thermocycler protocol.

Now, if this were the first time I'd gotten a result like this, it would be no problem. And, in fact, it wasn't a problem four attempts ago. This gel is my fifth attempt at getting these sequences! I've tried tweaking everything I can think of with my existing protocol, but nothing changes the result. My next step will be to use a forensic DNA extraction and amplification kit, which I've been trying not to do because of the expense involved.

If not for the fact that I have some evidence that N. bicornis is more than one species, I would have given up on this by now. The thing is, it's worth it to me because part of my research has to do with the evolution of host specificity and I've collected this beetle from four different fungi now. Not only is the coloration different in these populations, but there are more subtle morphological differences as well (for example, the proportions of the tarsomeres of the metatarsi). I've also used the large subunit sequences from two populations — one from Ganoderma lucidum in Florida and one from Pycnoporus cinnibarinus in Massachusetts — in a molecular phylogenetic analysis and guess what... they turn out to fall into two separate clades with 99% bootstrap support in a neighbor-joining tree after 500 replications. In other words, they're taxonomically classified as a single species, but considering how slowly this sequence evolves it's highly unlikely that they really are. I need to get the more rapidly-evolving cox1 sequence to clinch this, along with analyzing a few more populations and I can't get the damned thing.

What a tease.

I mean, just look...

If I had hair, I'd be pulling it out right now. I can take or leave the small subunit, but I must have the cox1 sequence.

OK, that's it, "Neomida bicornis," if that is your real name. You've pushed me too far. Next time you see me on the street, you'd better run. I'm gonna be packing Raid.

Christ Meets Mrs. Butterworth; Hilarity Ensues

2008-11-11T13:13:00.004-05:00

OK, I don't have much more than the title on this Daily Jesus, but the King of the Jews has popped up on somebody's plate again. This time, it's french toast in Pompano Beach, Florida.

South Florida Man Finds Jesus in his Toast
Troy Eckonen was eating breakfast at Mack's Cafe in Pompano Beach last Tuesday when he spotted Jesus' face on his last piece of French toast... he and friends also see Christ's left arm raised and holding a cross, as well as two birds over the left shoulder.

Note that Jesus has now shown up on french toast. This is clearly a divine endorsement of the French socialist welfare state. Still, one wonders whether it's proper etiquette to smear the son o'God with butter, drench him in syrup and take a bite. Mmmmm, transubstantiation.

Notice that Jesus never shows up in healthy food. It's always something high in fat. Cleanliness stops being next to godliness when it comes to arterial walls.

Obama is the Antichrist, the Sky is Falling, and Bigfoot is Coming to Take Your Soul

2008-11-11T07:33:00.000-05:00

I shouldn't be astounded at the profound depths of superstition into which great chunks of America has sunk anymore. Really, nothing should surprise me when it comes to the extremes of irrationality that grips far too many people anymore. Nonetheless, it does. It truly does. Even as some of the world comes to better understand the world as it is, to peer deep into the heart of matter and prize out the basic mechanisms by which it works, other parts of it retreat further and further into the dark dungeon of ignorance and fear and bar the door behind them.

It is thus that we find that there are people walking among us who are utterly terrified of the supernatural implications of the last presidential election. Apparently, it's the boogeyman who will be moving into the White House in January. Hellfire is going to rain down upon the planet because of this. The world is ending.

The number one question being asked: Is Barack Obama the antichrist? I've received dozens of emails pointing out the odd fact that the day after the election, the daily pick-three lottery number in Obama's home state of Illinois was "6-6-6..."

I don't see anything shocking in last week's election. I do believe strongly that a dark demonic cloud has swept over the land, but this is how we should expect the end times to play out. And, I foresee more negative events to come. The only thing that worries me is the Christians who fail to see the danger that comes from prophecy being fulfilled in our day.

I believe we are entering a time when Christians really need to set their priorities. Your last chance to do something for the kingdom of God may be sooner than you realize...
— Todd Strandberg, "Fasten Your Seatbelts"

Ummm, yeah. See pp. 51-59 of John Allen Paulos' Irreligion about that first paragraph. On November 5, as on every day, there are several numbers drawn in the Illinois lottery, and the fact is that the Evening Pick 3 number was 666. By the same token, the Midday Pick 3 was 779 and the Evening Pick 4 was 7779. What to make of that set of two numbers numbers? The odds that the combination 7-7-9 would be picked twice in the same day is far smaller than the odds off 6-6-6 being drawn once, so it would seem to me that on purely probabilistic terms the first combination would be far more significant than the latter, but this is a classic case of confirmation bias. 6-6-6 has a special significance to some people, whereas 7-7-9 doesn't, so they notice one number while ignoring the other. It's also worth noting that 6-6-6 was also drawn as the winning number for the Midday Pick 3 of the Illinois lottery on 10/23/08, the Evening Pick 4 (as 0-6-6-6) on 7/5/08 (the day after Independence Day! Clearly, America is Satanic!), the Evening Pick 3 on 3/22/08 the first day of Spring!), and the Evening Pick 3 on 1/16/08, and nobody made a big deal about these other four instances of the same number being drawn on these other days in the very same lottery. Why is that? Simple: on those days, it was simply a random number, just as it was the fifth time it was picked in 2008 on November 5.

It's all in their heads, of course. Sheer superstitious nonsense... omens and portents and witchcraft. Some people who want to believe that the next President of the United States is the Anti-christ go out of their way to find evidence to support their conclusion, then trumpet it about the lunatic echo-chamber until it becomes some superstitious blogger's "number one question." Said blogger, sharing to some extent in the belief (in this case, that Obama may not be the Anti-christ, but he's certainly going to help set this mythical figure on some throne) doesn't do any research to determine if there could be any significance. He simply furthers the ignorance and insanity in which he shares and chucks out a bunch of self-serving babble drawn from something entirely unrelated to American politics, probabilities or evidence from the same lottery that might refute the very thing he mentions yet again. Why dispel a bizarre rumor with sound information when you can preserve it with gibberish?

But wait, what if Obama isn't merely the Anti-christ? What if he's Satan himself! Isn't that special?

I have never been one for making "political" commentary, and I'll admit I haven't deeply explored the issues, but watching from the sideline, I am seeing some connections between our new president, and our old prophecies. Seems like people have been looking for the Antichrist for years, and each generation has never been disappointed to find one, even several! Maybe we have moved past that now to something even more ominous - the beast...

I have heard of Christians who voted for him for economic reasons. They believe he will save the economy. If economics is the most important thing, then our focus is in the wrong place. We cannot serve both God and money. Incidentally, there is only one other reference that I know of in the Bible regarding the number 666, and it is regarding Solomon's gold. If the mark of the beast has to do with our love of gold instead of our love of God, then maybe this is the time when the man of lawlessness has been revealed. Just maybe.
— Nicodemus, "Obama Is Not The Antichrist...But Maybe Something Worse"

Who could possibly refute the argument that people being overwhelmingly concerned about economics during a period of economic stress and voting accordingly is evidence that the person they voted for is Satan? I mean, aside from anyone who wasn't already of the opinion that the person elected was some supernatural force of evil. That economic collapse itself might usher in a period of terrible hardships across the nation and around the globe isn't important. What's important is that anyone who doesn't agree with Nicodemus' priorities, based in turn on his religious ideology, just helped but Beelzebub in power. Shame on you, worrying about the possibility of your kids not being able to get a higher education, about not having money on which to survive after retirement, about being able to keep your family fed and sheltered. All of that's just a distraction! Your family doesn't need such things, because Jesus is signing unemployment checks.

Still, for sheer desperation to believe that Obama heralds the end of the world, it's hard to beat the blatant idiocy of "evidence" like this:

One thing that has amazed me is how Barack Obama is not only considered to be a president-elect of the United States, but also president OF THE WORLD...

The Economist reported that Mr. Obama "quickly scooped support from readers in China, India and most of Europe, as well as from the United States itself. Mr. Obama won the backing of an overwhelming share of voters in 56 countries — including the likes of Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Indonesia and South Korea — claiming the support of 90 percent (or more) of those who voted."

The world map was almost a monochromatic blue expressing strong support for Obama, including in the Philippines. The only exceptions were Iraq, Algeria, Cuba and Congo in favoring Sen. John McCain. The general result of this Global Electoral College poll may look lopsided, but it is not unexpected. Opinion polls including one carried by the BBC also revealed that Mr. Obama is the world's overwhelming choice.

How about that? This is significant considering that the Antichrist will also have support of most of the world when he begins his reign. I cannot think of a time in history when an American president was viewed as an "overwhelming choice of the world."

Another fascinating feature about the antichrist is his charismatic personality that leaves people awe struck...
— Rich Wilbur, "Is Barack Obama The Antichrist?"

The fact that the election of Obama is celebrated by a world that has worried over the last eight years of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive warfare against any nation we think might be some kind of threat at some point in the future is a sign of the apocalypse, you see. That Obama is charismatic, that he might have (shudder to think!) a global view, that he's not bellicose and threatening, that the world might breathe a collective sigh of relief... these are signs of an evil nature. Normally, of course, the United States elects uncharismatic presidents who are lazy and anti-intellectual, who view the outside world as a threat, whose finger trembles perennially just above the metaphorical big red button. The election of someone not like this, someone that the rest of humanity thinks might actually be a shift away from a dangerous America, is evidence that he might be the Antichrist.

Now, in all fairness this same author isn't fully convinced that Obama is the son o' Satan:

...Remember, the identity of the antichrist is not for us to know, but for the world to know. He will offer himself up to the world...

In the mean time, we will continue to watch and pray and make associations of what the bible says about the antichrist to Obama or anyone else who fits the bill.

Hmmm... then again, Rich Wilbur is saying that Obama "fills the bill." Wilbur doesn't know that Obama is the Antichrist, but he clearly could be, and Wilbur spends a good deal of time in this piece providing evidence that he is before leaving himself an out at the very end of his supernaturally paranoid screed just in case, you know, it turns out that he isn't.

Of course, we can save any of these bloggers the trouble by simply pointing out that history is filled with Antichrists pointed out by any number of Millennialists and the world is still here and they're still in it. The thing is, these people want to believe this nonsense. They're living in a demon-haunted world, a sort of paranoid parallel universe, inhabited by Christ and Antichrist, witches and ghosts and things lurking under the bed. Spooky stuff, that.

You know, sooner or later someone inspired by the kind of religious fear embodied by these three authors (and untold thousands more equally fretful true-believers; these are just three examples I happened across) is going to try to "stop the Antichrist" with a bullet. It's a pathetic likelihood, but I'm sorry to say that I think it's coming. It'll be someone like Jim Adkisson, some self-styled foot soldier who gets "the message" and decides to do something about it. Sooner or later, there's going to be one lunatic out there who thinks that he or she is going to be covered in glory for attempting to put a bullet into the 44^th President/Antichrist/Terrorist-in-Chief.

This is the sickness that confronts us, even here in the 21^st century, centuries after the Enlightenment. Americans still believe in evil spirits, and they believe that anything they don't like is the result of one of them. And then, sooner or later, one of them tries to kill it.

People Doing Good Things for Children in Worcester

2008-11-10T17:48:00.000-05:00

I found this flyer tucked beneath the windshield wiper of my car when I went out for lunch today:

I'm always a little suspicious of religious groups' motivations in things like this, so I checked out the Love146 website and they seem like a legitimate, non-theistic organization that happens to work with churches among many other kinds of organizations (including the National Organization of Women). They've got a blog, too, if anyone seeing this wants to check out even more information about the group. I'm thus passing the word about Saturday's event to fellow Wormtowners who might not otherwise have seen it. LL is also going to make an announcement about this in the class she teaches at Holy Cross tomorrow night.

I'll probably go to the yard sale on Saturday. I don't have anything to donate for it, but for the same reasons I don't have stuff to give there are a few things I might well need to buy.

I hope to see some other folks from the Worcester blogosphere there. If you see me, please come over and say hello.

Well, Hello There

2008-11-10T14:50:00.005-05:00

And this is what I look like while I'm dissecting beetles. My adviser thinks it's a "good look for me." Am I a geek yet?

Yeah, yeah.

Worcester: Speaking of Politics

2008-11-10T08:08:00.001-05:00

If your one of those people who hasn't had their fill of slicing and dicing the results of this last election and what it means going forward, and you happen to live in or near Worcester, consider coming to the UU church on Holden Street at 7:00 PM tomorrow night. The Greater Worcester Humanists will be holding an open discussion about these topics.

The event is free and open to the public. Moreover, tickets will be on sale for the GWH's Darwin Bicentennial celebration to be held on February 14 at the Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston. Tickets to the event are $45 and include a luncheon, music and a talk by Harvard biologist David Haig.

Palin 2012? Not Likely: The Evolution of the GOP

2008-11-10T07:18:00.000-05:00

As much as the last US elections might have been about change, one thing hasn't changed at all. We are still a nation with only two viable political parties, Republicans and Democrats, and one of those two parties was essentially ground up into something that looks like red sausage. It's now eating itself and, at the same time, trying to figure out what it's going to do next. Personally, I didn't vote for anything or anyone Republican in the last election, nor in the one before that, nor even in the one before that one. The Republicans don't represent anything in which I believe, so I don't have any motivation to vote for them. In fact, they've long since turned themselves into the antithesis of anything for which I would personally stand. They've become the party of social cruelty and culture war. The last election pointed out to them, I think, that there are a lot of people like me out there.

In looking forward, one of the memes that keeps bubbling to the surface is "Palin 2012." Really? This is a good idea? Palin, after all, was brought into the campaign for two reasons. The first was in an attempt to attract support from supposedly disenfranchised Hillary Clinton backers, and all evidence points to her failing miserably in this mission. The second reason was to "energize" the base — the gaggle of socially arch-conservative, religiously motivated and anti-intellectual voters that would normally vote Republican no matter what but for whom McCain himself held little to no appeal. These aren't people who were going to vote for Obama on election day; the danger was that they wouldn't vote at all. Palin's run at vice president was a success on this count, but as we saw, success in this case doesn't look much like victory. Assuming no dramatic swing back to the far right — and the evidence seems to suggest a generational change is at work against such an event — Palin isn't likely to win a nomination in 2012, let alone a general election. This has less to do with her portrayal as a bit of Alaskan fluff by the media. What has become the Republican base is simply shrinking. People are fed up with the fostering of a divided society whose leaders are terrified by progress and insistent upon moral absolutes in all things, that demands absolute freedom for markets even as it erodes the liberty of individuals.

What, then, might be the future of this party? If it doesn't lie with Sarah Palin and her "you betcha, gosh darn golly Joe Sixpack drill baby drill and buy your own damned rape kit" ideologies, then who might carry the torch forward?

We're beginning to see some clues, particularly from the coasts — places in which Republicans haven't been doing very well at carrying national elections for the past couple of cycles and which are generally written off and derided by their base. The fact is, though, that these are also places with the weight of population in their favor, ignored at the peril of ever having influence in politics. The rigidly dogmatic social stances of the GOP as it has been — the GOP of the base — is likely going to have to change if they're going to play in such places as a national party. For instance, even though Proposition 8 passed in California and gay marriage got banned, the fact is that a margin of about 20 points in a 2000 attempt at banning it has shrunk to one of only 5 points this time around. The trend there is clearly, powerfully, away from unreasoning traditionalism and toward increasing tolerance of diversity.

We'll take our first clue from the Governator, California's own Arnold Schwarzenegger. In today's LA Times, Schwarzenegger had this to say about Proposition 8's passage:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Sunday expressed hope that the California Supreme Court would overturn Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage...

Schwarzenegger publicly opposed Proposition 8, which amends the state Constitution to declare that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

On Sunday, he urged backers of gay marriage to follow the lesson he learned as a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were too heavy for him at first. "I learned that you should never ever give up. . . . They should never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done."
— Source

This is the same Ahnold who had Republicans so excited not long ago that there was talk of amending the US Constitution to allow for citizens not born in the United States to become President for the first time in our history. Has the confluence of these messages sunk in yet, one wonders, with whatever passes for GOP leadership? Touting Palin and similar far-right candidates might play well in particular congressional districts and maybe in population-poor places like Oklahoma and Wyoming, but on the national level it's a sure path to failure.

A second clue comes from the East Coast, particularly from New England. In the Boston Globe, Republican columnist James Peyser talks about "How New England's Republicans Can Hit Restart":

...The number of Massachusetts Republicans in the US Congress remains stuck at zero. The party's US Senate candidate polled less than a third of the votes, winning only one town in the entire state. Come January, there will be not a single New England Republican in the US House of Representatives...

The underlying problem for Republicans is the absence of a compelling conservative vision for the future that is aligned with New England's more tolerant and civic-minded political sensibilities...

Today's conservative agenda includes a censorious social policy that panders to the Christian right, a guns and butter fiscal policy that would make Lyndon Johnson blush, and a Wilsonian foreign policy that is increasingly untethered from the national interest...

A new Republican vision should focus squarely on the future, with a sense of hope for what lies ahead. Any conservatism worthy of the name honors tradition. But there is all the difference in the world between careful stewardship of our heritage and rigid traditionalism... Unfortunately, the loudest voices of conservatism on the national stage today are more likely to bemoan America's decline than to praise its potential. They are also increasingly known for their resistance to science, technology, and change. This rejection of hope and progress runs against the grain of the American spirit and is a formula for even more electoral defeats...
— Source

In short, the religious moral absolutists, the Luddites and Creationists, the culture warriors, the Palin/Limbaugh/Coulter far-right wing of the GOP needs to be jettisoned if there's going to be a nationally viable GOP at all. What makes America great, and what excites the electorate, isn't feverish clinging to 18^th century absolutism, it's the looking forward to the future, the change, the advancement. It's optimism, not fear. It's opening up the culture to the next leap in its evolution, not huddling in our caves and hoping that the thunder god doesn't hurl lightning bolts down upon our miserable heads. The base is not enough anymore, and good riddance to its dominance.

I've never been one to be in favor of a political system that provides a realistic choice between only two parties. When push comes to shove, I would like very much to see a more parliamentarian system in which there are numerous parties spanning the political spectrum that must forge compromises and alliances in order for government to function. In my ideal world, America would have at least a dozen parties from which voters could choose and complete dominance by any one party would be a vanishingly rare event. Such a system, I think, would better insure that all voices were heard and create better representation for all of us, wherever we might fall across the spectrum. But that's an ideal world that seems incredibly unlikely to come into existence within the lifetime of anyone reading this. It would seem that, for the foreseeable future, we will continue to have only one more party than a one-party state. If Republicans want to preserve even that much diversity, though, it's incumbent upon them to start becoming less ideological and more representative.

The dinosaurs of the extreme right wing aren't going to be much of a part of this sort of outcome, unfortunately for them but much to the joy of those of us who are sick and tired of seeing the populace turned against itself. The purveyors of fear and ignorance are due for a return back to the fringe of political discourse which, in truth, is where they've always belonged. It is in our own best national interest as Americans that the GOP does this in the course of expanding its appeal and becoming a national party. It will help insure that we all do better, that our country does better, that we move forward into something like a hopeful future — even if we as individuals still disagree with some of the party's new platform enough not to vote for them.

Can the GOP run Palin in 2012? Absolutely. It's their prerogative to do so if they wish. Anyone can go to the dance and choose to be a wallflower if they so desire. If they want to move forward and so move the nation forward, though, they'd be well-advised to listen attentively to other voices within their own party. The message coming from the coasts, delivered by people like Schwarzenegger and Peyser, is loud and clear. If the national GOP doesn't want to hear it, if they prefer to stick their fingers in their ears and keep doing the same things that have resulted in the results of the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, then the electorate is also free to shake its collective head and hope that the GOP enjoys its exile in Oklahoma.

The George W. Bush Freedom Liberry and Family Fun Center

2008-11-09T18:25:00.003-05:00

Don't think for a minute that The Decider is being a lazy lame duck these days. The San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Fiore breaks the story of Dubya's next big project: the George W. Bush Freedom Liberry and Family Fun Center!

Looks like we're still in for quite a ride!

Ban on Stem Cell Line Development May End

2008-11-09T15:17:00.004-05:00

I was in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad on the day that Dubya came on the airwaves and announced that the development of new stem cell lines was to be banned in the United States. He did this by executive order, a sort of edict open to presidents that Bush exploited to an extent unprecedented in American history. In any case, I remember where I was when the Dubya delivered his proclamation because it was a big deal to me at the time. It still is.

President-elect Barack Obama's transition chief said Sunday the incoming administration is looking to reverse President George W. Bush's executive orders on stem cell research...

Bush has limited federal spending on stem cell research, a position championed by opponents of abortion rights. Obama has supported the research in an effort to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's...
— Source

It comes as good news, then, that Dubya's executive order is under review by the incoming administration. While it's not a done deal yet, Obama has stated in the past that he favored expanding stem cell research. If he comes through and reverses the standing executive order after taking office, the result could well be a boon not only to the treatment of injury and disease in the long run, but to American competitiveness in biotechnology in the short run. We've been losing out on both of these fronts for the sake of preserving discarded, frozen embryos for seven years now. Luckily, the research has continued in other countries and much of it is a matter of published record.

Change may really be coming. Whether this change will amount to an increase in funding for research limited to working on the few permissible (and far from the best) stem cell lines allowed under the Bush restrictions, or whether there will be the opportunity for the development of new stem cell lines is unclear to me. I suspect it will be the latter, though, if the incoming administration is honestly dedicated to letting research in the area advance.

Inspired by the Prince of Peace, Priests Beat the Crap Out of Each Other

2008-11-09T12:21:00.004-05:00

Ah, religion. There's just nothing quite like it for bringing people together.

The video above is footage of a brawl that erupted at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the place where some believe that Jesus was entombed. It seems that a number of different cults like to have fist fights among their clergy as to who controls which corner of the church. In this case, the fighting broke out between Greek and Armenian Orthodox clerics when the Armenian true-believers wanted to have a walk through the church to celebrate something that the Greeks don't believe happened. The Greeks wouldn't let them, and what began as a perfectly irrational argument over mythology soon degenerated into an all-out brawl that had to be broken up by Israeli police.

It's worth noting that these same religious groups are so overwhelmingly concerned about human life that secular authorities have been unable to put a single fire exit in the place. The holy men can't agree with one another where such a life-savingly blasphemous bit of human consideration ought to go, you see, so they're willing to take their chances that there won't be a fire that consumes the true-believers. I guess they believe more in praying than they do in fire exits, and apparently they believe more in punching, kicking and strangling one another than they do is peaceful coexistence and compromise.

At the same time, a rooftop shrine on the church is literally on the verge of collapse because two of the other sects that control little bits of the place — Ethiopians and Copts in this case — can't agree with each other about it.

It's truly a wondrous thing that this single building in Israel can serve as such a powerful metaphor for what these religious cults do to the world. And we're talking about what should be, to any rational person, superficial differences in doctrine that divide these loonies in the first place. No wonder even bigger doctrinal differences lead so often to war.

More about these lovely true-believers in Jerusalem here and here. Hallelujah.

On California's Proposition 8, or What the Hell is Oozing Out of Our Ground

2008-11-08T10:57:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't seen this video already, this redolent summation of the depths of ignorance and paranoia, watch it now. There will be a quiz.

As much as I find the video itself appalling insofar as what it reveals about just how much the stupid can burn, the recent passage of California's Proposition 8 and similar referenda in places like Florida, Arizona and Arkansas leave me asking the same question the benighted woman narrating it asked. What the hell is oozing out of our ground?

There is a meanness in these new laws, a cruelty that is most loudly voiced by the fact that California will not only put a halt to future same-sex marriages but there are those who are now attempting to void those which have already taken place. Surprise, surprise... they're based in Florida:

Mathew Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based conservative legal group, said last week that if Prop. 8 passes, Liberty Counsel would seek to invalidate all same-sex marriages already performed in California. Randy Thomasson, president of the Sacramento-based SaveCalifornia.com, said his group would support any lawsuit.

"One of the main reasons for passing Prop. 8 was to have real marriage be a role model for the next generation," he said. "Since these are a bunch of false marriages and false marriage licenses, they are bad examples for little children."
— Source

Anyone who still harbors doubt that much of Florida is a percolating, roiling bowl of fundamentalist mythological contagion need look no further than the anthropoid vector of pestilence that is Matthew Staver and his Orwellianly-monikered Liberty Council to put those doubts to rest. Staver, by the way, is a dean at ignorance-factory Liberty University.

That there is no hope that someone like Staver will ever attain to a degree of empathy reminiscent of the better parts of the human race is without question. There are poisonous things in this world and there will always be poisonous things in this world. The question is not whether fundamentally sociopathic, inherently divisive and morally bankrupt people like Staver and Falwell and Don Wildmon can ever be reformed. I would submit that they cannot. Such people will always remain self-made enemies of the culture upon which they have declared war. This is the point of their existence. They thrive on pain and seek the increase of human suffering as a sign of upcoming divine intervention that will usher in a time when the better part of humanity will be tortured for all eternity by their invisible and vindictive father-figure in the sky. They feed on the decay, the hate, the division and the ignorance produced by their activities as surely as any leech slithering from a festering fen seeks to cling to and suck from the femoral artery of some victim. They are beyond all reproach in the perfection of their destructiveness.

In short, they are what is "oozing out of our ground." Still, they and those like them could not alone have passed the barbarisms that are these new laws, including Proposition 8. They must have had complicity in their efforts to corrupt the notion of human rights and the role of government intervention in the lives of others. I do not think that everyone who voted for new laws like Proposition 8 is a leech like Staver, but I do think that many of these people have been deceived, and deception is possible only in the presence of ignorance. The notion that people who prefer sexual interaction with members of their own gender would be in favor of pederasty, bestiality or any number of other outrageous perversions is precisely a product of that ignorance.

These warriors against rational and inclusive culture exploit this ignorance in several ways, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they exploit several varieties of ignorance. Let's face it — most Americans don't know many gay people, or at least aren't aware that they know any. To the bulk of the populace, gay people are an unknown. They're something that doesn't exist as a portion of their community as integral to its proper functioning as any heterosexual individual. They're something that one sees in the media, frequently as a caricature. They're an abstraction; gay people aren't human beings so much as a phantasm that is somebody else's "problem." By keeping them in the abstract, anything can be laid upon them. Gay people can be made out to be abnormal, villainous, scheming... in short, hobgoblins coming from some other reality, some other universe, with malicious intent, like some shadowy horde poised at the border and ready to sack the little villages in which far too many Americans fancy themselves to live. The American Family Association is particularly adept at exploiting this strain of ignorance, peddling videos like They're Coming to Your Town. The probability is that "they" are already in your town, have been there all along, and that your town — and any town — is all the better for it.

They exploit, too, an ignorance that puts forth the idea that the highest purpose of human existence is procreation. It's an assertion I see made time and time again — that homosexuality is a perversion because it doesn't result in reproduction, and that reproduction is the goal which gives purpose to all living things, thus making homosexuality itself a force that runs counter to life. What could be worse than that? What reasonable person could be opposed to the continuation of life itself!

The thing is, when one actually looks at life, that's not what we actually see, particularly as biological individualism gives way to social organization. In any number of truly social insects, for example, the vast bulk of the members of the society do not reproduce, yet they contribute essentially to the continuation of their society. When cognition enters the picture, sex often becomes less bound to reproduction and more a means of enforcing social bonds, too. Even among humans, we do not remember the important figures throughout our history because of the number of offspring they had. Indeed, most Americans would be hard-pressed to rattle off the names of the children of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington or John Adams. We don't remember how many children Einstein had. Would it make any difference to us how we view such people if they'd never reproduced at all? We humans are not bound to our biology in the way that animals are bound to theirs. We can think, we can create, and we can go far beyond the limitations of our bodies. To say that the greatest achievement to which any one of us may attain is mere reproduction is to reduce all of mankind to animals in a menagerie. It robs all of us, even those who promulgate this nonsense, of the basic dignity of what it is to be human. We are more than molecular machines who eat and shit and fuck, and if we are not then we may as well tear down all the churches and all the laboratories and all the museums and stop distracting ourselves from this allegedly greatest good that any of us can spew forth from our various orifices. I, for one, think that we can be more than mere gamete factories. I think more of humanity, and I have a crazy notion that even those who have fallen under the contrary viewpoint would as well if they stopped and considered the sum total of civilization instead of having fallen prey to those who have declared war upon the better angels of human nature.

The questions that Proposition 8 and these similar referenda raise for me, and perhaps now for you, too, is whether we Americans will choose to see ourselves as something debased. Are we the product of a history that has finally cut us loose from the muck of basic biology, that allows us to aspire, to achieve, to no longer be identified in terms of merely what we contribute to some gene pool... or are we the product of some long-ago fall from grace that leaves every individual stained with sin? Will we use our powers of imagination and abstraction to cast one another as enemies, as "outsider" and "insider," to divide ourselves into camps that deserve to dwell either in sunlight or shadow based upon some accident of biology or — perish the thought — even some personal choice that involves no lives apart from our own, or will we use these boons to go beyond these superficial differences to find out that we are all essentially the same, that we all want the same things, and that we are all deserving of the same rights to associate with whom we will, to love whom we will, and to find in each of us that which we have to offer to the rest of us and so to allow every other member of our society the right to do the same?

We know what the Stavers and Wildmons of this country have to say on the matter. They are believers in the essentially impurity or each of us, a blood libel that began in a garden at the confluence of rivers. I suppose we know equally well (especially if you've read through all of this!) what those of us who don't believe in any such "fall from grace" and "original sin" think about it. But there is a great mass of American flesh and blood and mind between these two extremes that live their lives without ever seeing the effect that their decisions about "sanctity" have upon those who now must bear the weight of the stigma that they attach to them. Would they reach the same conclusions if they knew these people? If they saw what a same-sex marriage actually looked like in the light of day? If they came to know, on a personal basis, that the hearts and minds of the people who have entered into them were no different from their own save for the gender of the object of affection?

It is easy enough to be cruel toward an abstraction. Despite our fallibility, though, I think that most of us could not be so callous when called to look into the eyes of fellow human beings. Doing this will be a first great stride in doing away with not only one of the final malingering divisions in American social philosophy, but also in ridding ourselves of a pernicious war that allows a few men to exploit the shortcoming of many. America can be better than this. Just as some little bit of knowledge about the principles of refraction would remove the paranoid fears of the silly woman who made the video that began this entry, so would a little knowledge about what a same-sex marriage really is would remove the paranoia that the possibility "they're coming to your town" portends something terrible.

I am privileged to live in a place, one of only two states in this country, that allows same-sex marriage. I'm thinking of a way in which I might be able to use that happy coincidence in such a way as to lend some aid to those who do not enjoy it. I'll write more about that soon. It is enough to say, at this moment, that I feel like I have to do more about this than I have done until this moment.

Ralph Nader Reveals His Racism Yet Again

2008-11-06T07:28:00.004-05:00

During the course of the contest for the presidency now ended, I was pleasantly surprised to note the absence of Ann Coulter from the airwaves. Coulter's slide into obscurity since the publication of her paranoid and bizarre screed, Godless, is one of the things that have given me some hope that America may be returning to reason and repudiating the visceral hatred of the radical right.

Leave it to Ralph Nader to remind us, in Coulter's absence, that old-fashioned racism and bigotry is still very much alive and isn't the exclusive domain of wingnutters. In a quote from Nader discussed in an election night interview on Fox News, Nader accused Barack Obama of being an "Uncle Tom" in his relationship to corporate interests.

Whether or not one agrees with the assertion that Obama is too accommodating to big business, clearly the assertion itself could be expressed without one of the most incendiary references to his race possible. In fact, the unapologetic Nader has gone out of his way to include the slur in his statement. What does it mean, after all, to ask whether Obama would be an "Uncle Sam" in the first place? Nader could simply have said that Obama was misrepresenting himself; there was no reason to do this.

Still, Nader has a long history now of making racist statements. Some prior instances of this have been collected here, including such gems as:

There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American," Nader said. "Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white?

The assertion that Obama's ethnicity should make him predisposed to speaking a certain way and cause him to focus on a particular set of issues or to hold to some specific set of priorities is, without question, utterly racist. Obama, just like any other person in this country, is free to think about things in whatever way he wishes, to speak however he thinks best, and to prioritize things in whatever way he desires. The whole point of equality is that everyone enjoys the same freedoms and the rest of us get to agree or disagree without consideration of the coincidence of skin color. Clearly, Nader disagrees with Martin Luther King's contention that we should judge people based on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin.

I've previously made note of Nader's racist tendencies. This latest fuselade is in itself no longer surprising, just revolting. That it took an interviewer on Fox News, of all places, to call Nader out on his garbage should be an embarrassment to anyone who has ever put stock in the man enough to have even considered voting for him. At this point, Nader is no longer due any respect whatsoever from anyone at all. He should be cast onto the rubbish heap of history, right next to Ann Coulter.

Fuel-Making Fungus: Put Some Gliocladium in Your Tank

2008-11-06T06:39:00.004-05:00

A fungus discovered in southern South America is capable of turning cellulose into diesel fuel, much like that used to power vehicles the world over. The endophyte (a fungus that lives inside of plant tissues), dubbed Gliocladium roseum, breaks down the cellulose and releases a vapor rich in octane, alcohols and esters in a mixture that burns with greater efficiency than diesel fuels currently on the market, resulting in what could become a lower-cost, cleaner-burning, renewable fuel source. While the fungus has so far been found only in a single tree species, New Scientist reports that

...the fungus can grow on cellulose, which contains huge amounts of hydrocarbon but is notoriously difficult to break down.

"It's the most abundant organic compound produced on earth, but most of it goes to waste," says [discoverer Gary] Strobel. By fermenting the fungus on cellulose, it should be possible to generate huge quantities of the diesel vapour "ready-for-use".

In other words, it might be possible to culture G. roseum in industrial-sized vats of medium made from waste paper products and covert that waste into relatively cheap energy while reducing carbon emissions. More research needs to be done to determine how economically this can be done.

All in all, this is yet another story for the "fungi... is there anything they can't do?" file. It's also another powerful argument about the importance of preserving natural resources and native ecology around the world. New species with applications that can improve our lives in numerous ways are frequently discovered. For every species lost that we know about, how many do we lose before we've ever found out about them in the first place? Gliocladium roseum could just as easily been among that latter category.

First Wednesday in November: Obama Wins

2008-11-05T10:05:00.000-05:00

In my recently less-than-sporadic efforts to bring you the latest news, I'm sure I'll be the first to mention that Barack Obama won the election and will be the next president. I'm glad for this. The alternative was clearly a very poor one and, of course, we're all aware by now about the historic context of his victory. This is big stuff, a sea-change, a climax in a struggle that began long before my own ancestors ever arrived in America.

I have followed the election closely for these past couple of months, even though I haven't had time to write about it. I have been all too aware of the hatred and panic, as well, that certain elements of our society have expressed over the impending turn in US history as my email box was besieged by dire and dirty "warnings" from Don Wildmon's American Family Association and their nethermost organ, OneNewsNow. To hear them tell it, we are all about to be swept up in a vast wave of stoned, gay, incestuous prostitutes in leather chaps, bearing pitchforks and crucifixes on the soles of their Birkenstocks. Their weather report, now that Obama has been elected, calls for periods of void-swallowing darkness followed by a rain of brimstone with a 30% chance of pale horses storming through the streets of America. In truth, or at least we need all hope, that these are the final fervent prayers and feverish visions of small people with tiny and malign minds, the kind that are ultimately drowned in the eddying currents of human progress.

In all honesty, one of the things that I most look forward to now that the election has been conducted and the ballots tallied is the impending absence of the whiny, shrill, nasal sound of Sarah Palin. I look forward, too, to the absence of scientific research being held up by the losing side every time they wanted to bring up an example of "earmarks" or "pork." Whether they understood basic research or not, the fact that McCain and Palin cited research into population genetic structure or molecular biology or a new projector for a planetarium — a place of science education — did not exactly endear them to this researcher. Had they won, I had visions of funding for research not entirely unlike my own simply vanishing in a puff of ignorance. They will not have the chance to do this, it seems. I count myself and my colleagues fortunate in this regard.

Aside from the historical coincidence (albeit an important one) of his ancestry, we have instead gotten a president elect who, as far as I can discern, is one of the most intelligent and well-educated in our history, and certainly in my lifetime. There are those to whom such qualifications make him, ironically, a member of the elite which, they believe, is a bad thing. There are those who will still judge the fitness of their governmental leadership on the basis of how much they'd like to have a beer with them, and those people will not shut up and go away based simply on the fact that their strange criterion has been repudiated by the electorate. On the other hand, I think that I would enjoy a beer with Barack. I would be very interested in sitting in a conversation with him without any beverages whatsoever, for that matter. We're not too far apart in age, after all, and more to the point I could easily envision a long and deep discussion of political and general philosophy with him. I felt no such thing in regard to McCain, certainly never have for Dubya, and I fear that were beer present during a one-on-one conversation with Palin, I might have sprayed it through my nose soon after she began wagging her chin. That would be rude, and I prefer not to be impolite when at all possible. The likelihood of any of this happening is nil, of course. I'm just Joe the Bio Grad Student and Obama has a government to run... and I have tarsomeres to measure. Still, my sense is that Obama gets it. He understands that the basic research of ten and twenty years ago is the technology of the present, and that once the pipeline empties it takes a long time to fill back up. America has dodged a bullet in a manner of which few people will ever be aware. It was a bullet aimed at our brain and the majority of my fellow Americans were smart enough to duck. Good for us.

So here we are on the first Wednesday in November. In about 60 days, ShrubCo at last begins its well-deserved dissolution and, we can be sure, a new track will be charted. We live in interesting times. Obama will need to exercise what I can only describe as greatness at a time when greatness may at best suffice only to staunch our collective bleeding as a nation. Anything less than greatness, anything short of a full application of his capacity to reason, to plan, to anticipate, is likely to result in a single term. Considering the smoking craters left by ShrubCo across our societal landscape, if Obama doesn't have greatness in him, it follows that we will need to find someone who does in four years' time. I am hopeful for now; the possibilities are endless and in most ways we have nowhere to go but up. Still, I am also a pragmatist, even in my idealism. I will say the same thing now to myself (and those who have read this far) that I said eight years ago: Let's see what this guy can do.

Having said all this, I do think it is important that Obama begin reaching out to the other side after this long and often fear-mongering contest. One way in which he could do this, I think, is to offer John McCain an appointment in his cabinet. As much as I loathe some of the tactics, even what passed for a strategy, in the campaign now ended, McCain should be given the benefit of the doubt and it should be recalled that he was not some fiend before the Ring of Power that was his quest for the presidency turned his Smeagle into our Gollum. McCain's strength, it has been said, was in foreign policy. He might be well-employed as a Secretary of Defense. Even making the offer would help to heal the divisions that were pried wide open in these past months. This might have another, even more important, effect in the near future.

Obama is in a good position, I think, to have an impact on the upcoming reformulation of the Republican Party. I believe that one thing that the GOP will learn from this election is that the base is not enough and, indeed, the very constituencies that make up what they have come to consider their base are, in fact, a polarizing power that precludes their having the support of more reality-based Americans. In the end, after all, McCain had to distance himself from Ted Hagee every bit as much as he sought to distance himself from George Bush. Obama could drive that point home with a few key appointments, I think. Few things could be healthier for this country, even for this civilization, than the showing of the door to the Dominionists and Millennialists by the party over which they have exercised enough influence to pry perilously loose from the reality of American life. We saw the base (and base they were!) "energized" by Sarah Palin, and we saw the GOP lose big. Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan have recently said the same thing, so I don't think this idea is too radical. It's time to disentangle that which was supposed to be the party of fiscal conservatism from the business of attempts to legislate morality. Giving Americans a choice of a party in which these two things are no longer intricately wound together will be a boon for all of us, even if we are not ourselves fiscal conservatives.

Which brings me, sadly, to the thing arising from this election that most drags upon my spirit this morning. It appears that Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex marriage in California, is going to pass by a narrow margin. It is for this reason that I prefaced this long and much overdue entry with the point that Obama's win marks a climax in a long struggle but not the climax. Just as there will continue to be intolerance to people of African ancestry in places in America, even though one will be our next President, just so we should keep in mind that others will still be marginalized as well. Even though they lost the Presidential election of 2008, those small-minded busybodies determined to stick their noses in everyone else's crotches as a test for righteousness are still very much with us and they may very well win this victory, as short-lived as it is likely to turn out, on the West Coast of the United States. They are, and will continue to be, dedicated to a "culture war" in which our own culture makes war upon itself. They will continue to seek to do harm in the name of nothing more than personal belief and preference.

They will be with us, I am sorry to say, for many years to come.

It took nearly 400 years for people somewhat like the man we have just elected President to get the right to self-determination, the right to own property, the right to vote as a whole human being (and not just some fraction thereof), and to marry whomever they liked. It took generations to get to this point, and it took sacrifice and struggle and, yes, the deaths of some very good people brought about by some of the worst people who opposed them. This is the course, too, that gay equality advocates have faced. It was once a crime punishable by death to prefer sexual friction with a member of one's own gender. It is not so now. As long as there are people courageous enough to speak out, progress will continue and the tiny, malign minds will, in the end, be swept away by the current of human history once again.

The leather chaps are, of course, optional.

What Spore Teaches Us About Intelligent Design: The Four Lessons of Casey Luskin

2008-09-19T06:56:00.006-04:00

I'm proud to note that I've added numerous points to my geek cred scale recently by purchasing a copy of EA/Maxis' computer game, Spore. I haven't had much time to play it, but I have managed to take a species of mine all the way to the galactic phase. My little critters, the Shub, are gleefully jetting about the galaxy, although their home world, Mloukhiye, is currently under attack. You can see a Shub there on the right. Cute, no?

I like Spore. It's a fun little game, and that's all it is. I wouldn't dream of using it as a tool with which to instruct students about evolutionary biology for a very simple reason; it's nothing like evolutionary biology. It lacks most of the mechanisms that we see driving evolution in the real world. There's no random mutation in Spore, for instance. Nor is there sexual selection, genetic drift or gene flow. In fact, Spore is essentially The Sims with characters that aren't necessarily human or even human-like. In the real world, species don't jump from being cells to having legs because they eat enough bits of nutrient floating in liquid medium. They don't grow bigger brains because they sing duets with other organisms. The real world simply doesn't work like Spore. In other words, Spore isn't evidence for or against any empirical principle. It is, after all, just a fun little game.

That, of course, isn't going to stop the ID Creationism contingent from advancing the notion that this bit of electronic fluff from Electronic Arts somehow supports their notion of how the diversity of life arose on the planet. They are not, after all, under the constraint of testing hypotheses, nor even of rudimentary common sense, because the vacuous nonsense they assert as a theory (proving that they're not even under the constraint of English usage) is just that — vacuous. They could as easily maintain that the existence of pie is evidence that prayer has the power to turn the head purple. We are thus treated to platters of blather such as an article in The Christian Post in which Casey Luskin, better known to sentient beings everywhere as Captain Clownie, yammers on about how a computer game is evidence of, and teaches users about, his favorite content-free fairy tale:

'Spore' Game Helps Players Understand Intelligent Design
Fans of a video game about evolution include young Christian teenagers and intelligent design proponents

By Katherine T. Phan
Christian Post Reporter

While the latest video-game craze, "Spore," touts the theory of evolution, taking gamers from a single-celled organism to complex civilizations, some say it also promotes God and intelligent design...

Players start the game with the task of feeding a single-cellular amoeba that eventually lays an egg after it has consumed enough blob-like nutrients in its 2-D world. The egg allows gamers to edit their simple organism into a more complex creature - with seven legs, one eye and purple skin if they so desired.

At each egg stage, players can further "evolve" their creatures to have different body structures, physical capabilities and even bigger brains – all of which affect the creatures' abilities and personalities in the game...

Let's pause right here for a moment. In Spore, players do not "evolve" their creatures, they edit their creatures. There's a big difference here. See, you have to click this little button and a new window opens. The player then spends a few "DNA points" to buy arms and legs and eyes which they choose from a menu on the left side of the screen. That isn't evolution by any definition, of course. Is it intelligent design? Sure, assuming that the player isn't a member of the Discovery Institute, barring appropriate use of the word "intelligent" in this context. However, is it evidence for what Luskin and his Creationist clown car assert? Is this how the designer designs? Is he constrained by a budget of DNA points amassed by creatures eating blobs of algae? Well, the truth is... I don't know. Since one of the assertions these numbskulls make is that we can't know anything about their designer (whom, for the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to as Bob the Builder henceforth), he could be clicking away at a menu on some celestial computer somewhere and we could all be nothing more than critters in a pangalactic Sporepedia. However, I am unaware of the proponents of ID ever having advanced this notion beforehand... which, for their purposes, is just fine, since their vacuity isn't constrained by the requirement of predictiveness, anyhow. Unlike real scientists, IDolators are free to make it up as they go along. Everything they do is ad hoc.

And here we have the first thing that Spore really does teach players about Intelligent Design; one can say nearly anything (real biology is barred from discussion, of course), and ID pseudotheory can find a way to accommodate it. Chalk one up for Captain Clownie. We've all learned a valuable lesson. To continue with the article, then:

"Anyone can see that Spore is not really about evolution by the Darwinian mechanism; it's about evolution by intelligent design," Casey Luskin with Discovery Institute, a leading intelligent design think tank, wrote on the group's affiliated blog Evolution News & View...

Well-played, Captain! I agree entirely; anyone who knows anything about evolutionary biology can see that Spore is not about evolution by Darwinian mechanisms, nor by any other mechanisms seen in the real world. The thing is, so what? Computer games routinely violate the laws of physics; one might just as well state that Super Mario Brothers isn't about quantum mechanics. See, entertainment devices don't always seek to replicate the real world and Spore is not a teaching tool. It isn't science. It's a computer game from which precisely zero lessons about the universe in which we (by which I do not mean to necessarily include Captain Clownie and the Funtime Gang over at the DI) actually exist. In truth, Spore is about neither evolutionary biology nor about religiously-derived "alternative theories." It's about having a bit of fun.

But here we have our second lesson about Intelligent Design inadvertently brought to the fore by Spore: ID advocates can't tell the difference between a fantasy role-playing game and reality. Note that this is a notoriously poor sort of mindset from which to begin the genesis of anything useful to science. But they do go on:

The game even refutes many Darwinist objections to I.D., argued Luskin, including one objection that says detecting design requires knowledge about the designer.

"Browsing on YouTube I can find hundreds if not thousands of Spore creatures that were designed by people whose real names, parents' names, and tribes of origin I know nothing about. We don't have to know who the designer is, or who spawned the designer, to be able to detect design," wrote Luskin...

I'm unfamiliar with the argument that Luskin says we "Darwinists" bring up in regard to IDiocy. I am, however, familiar with two arguments that he may have crammed together here. The first is that if design is present, it should be detectable and the second is that if there is a designer present the designer should also be detectable and because that designer can be observed, even indirectly, it absolutely follows that we could say something about the nature of that designer based upon how Bob the Builder designs. We could infer, for instance, what kind of design regime it follows, what sorts of tools Bob uses, etc., all of which perforce tell us something about this veiled designer.

Captain Clownie, of course, puts his foot right in it when he says that he can't tell anything about the people who designed the Spore creatures he's found on YouTube. This may be indicative of the extent of Luskin's brain damage, since anyone lacking his degree of cognitive impairment can say any number of things about the designers of Spore creatures without even looking at the creatures themselves. For example, it's a sure bet that every single person who has designed a Spore creature has used the Spore creature creator to do so, and we can thus infer that such individuals also have access to at least one computer and furthermore know how to use it, could we not? We can make some educated guesses about what colors these designers favor, particular if we can find several of their creations and note what they have in common in this regard. More importantly, we can test our hypotheses about these junior Bobs by sending them an email and asking a few questions. Some might choose not to respond, but at least a few of them would and we could expand from our initial hypothesis to build a profile of one or more designers, look for commonalities between them and ultimately come up with some idea of what unites the kind of people who make creatures for Spore. In fact, you can bet your bottom dollar that there are people working at EA who do just this kind of thing for a living. In case Captain Clownie missed it, then, here's a clue; this discipline is called marketing. Even if Luskin didn't investigate the creators of those Spore critters on YouTube, other people make a living doing precisely that. In fact, they did so before anyone ever bought the game, and the information they uncovered was used to make predictions about who would buy Spore and how many buyers there would be long before the game itself ever hit the shelves. If they were correct, they might get a nice bonus. If they were wrong, they might get fired. This works just like science; what's known prior to an experiment (in this case, the launch of a product) is used to create a hypothesis which is then tested, evidence for and against the hypothesis is gathered, and the hypothesis is either conditionally accepted or rejected.

Here, we learn our third lesson about ID Creationism — it doesn't lend itself to inquiry. As soon as a bit of useful agitprop is formulated, inquiry ceases. Luskin didn't find anything about to say about the Spore creators because he didn't even trying once he could make some statement in support of an a priori conclusion. We have learned that Intelligent Design is, in fact, exactly the opposite of the search for the truth about the world in which we live — a most valuable lesson, indeed.

Benjamin Cormack, writing on the gaming Website GotGame.com suggested Spore may even help players understand, in a small way, the heart of God.

"As you guide and care for your creations, you may actually develop an almost parental sense of pride in watching them grow, kind of like children or sea monkeys," he wrote...

Well, that's a very long way from Captain Clownie's assertion that it isn't necessary to infer anything about Bob the Builder, isn't it? Cormack is certainly saying something about God (and, after all, that's precisely who Bob the Builder really is!) Of course, it's also a tremendous leap of logic and certainly a category error. It's based on a major statement about the nature of the designer — this designer has human emotions and, not only that, applies them in an entirely human way. Bob the Builder forms attachments to the things it creates.

We get yet another lesson about Intelligent Design, then. It has no problem with contradicting itself in order to accommodate any opinion about anything at all, so long as that opinion is one in contradiction of sound science and reason. This is, of course, a major advantage of being vacuous.

It turns out, then, that Captain Clownie is absolutely correct in his assertion, shared with numerous other IDolators, that Spore teaches players about Intelligent Design. He's just wrong about what lessons those players can learn. What Spore has done is simply to bring the termites out of Bob the Builder's woodpile to make the usual round of silly statements that those of us who still have a few working brain cells firing away can then dissect using that most incisive of scalpels, reason. In summation, we who are still in possession of this valuable faculty and who hold it in esteem learn the most valuable lesson of all about Intelligent Design from the reaction of one of its leading advocates to Spore. That is, they aren't very good tool-users. They tend to apply a cudgel when what's called for a nice, sharp blade.

The ability to use tools is a major part of what makes us humans. To be a bad tool user is, in a sense, to be an inferior human being. I would submit, then, that the ultimate lesson one can take away from all of this is about Casey Luskin himself and, based upon their assent to Captain Clownie's arguments, about the leadership and members of the Discovery Institute. They don't know how to use the one tool that makes all other possible — reason. They're not so much a think tank as they are a holding pen for the chronically deficient who have benefited from the relaxed requirements of fitness that good tool-users have engendered. Natural selection having failed to remove them from the ideological gene pool so far, we shall have to wait for the effects of some other factor to lead in the end to their inevitable extinction. Surely the very fact that this rubber-nosed know-nothing can assert that one can learn about the real world by playing a video game should be enough to demonstrate how jejune is the black hole of intellect termed "intelligent design" for all of humanity. At least, I would like to think it that obviously stupid.

I also suspect, sadly, that someone will come along to dash my hopes any minute now.

American LL: Citizenship Day 2008 at Fenway Park

2008-09-18T06:04:00.003-04:00

LL officially became a US citizen yesterday at Citizenship Day 2008, which took place at Fenway Park. Just over 3,000 other immigrants did as well. The event was huge, disorganized and took more than five hours to complete. It included lots of canned patriotism, not the least of which was a videotaped message from Dubya congratulating the newly-minted Americans on having achieved citizenship — inexplicably shown before the oath was administered. The event also included lots of religious hoo-hah; god bless this and that and the other thing. The event was also a great advertising opportunity for the Red Sox. Even as attendees were being shown patriotic imagery and having certain bits of the Constitution explained incorrectly to them (since when does the second amendment guarantee a right of self-defense with firearms? My copy of the Constitution only has a bit about a "well-regulated militia."), Red Sox marketing was passing out "Red Sox Nation" bracelets, and more than one speaker equated being a Red Sox fan with being a good American. No, really.

For me, there was a certain irony to the repeated advising of the new citizens to get involved and learn English and such. LL speaks and writes English better than the majority of people born in this country and she's certainly more involved with the community than most, including myself.

Nonetheless, it was a big ritual and now LL can cast a vote against the religious right wackos and incompetents in the next election, a big part of why she wanted to go through this whole trial in the first place. So, here are some photos.

	Citizenship: It's over there to your left.
	Crowd shot; line up over here. No, line up over there. "If you don't stand behind me, you don't get to be a citizen." The first practical lesson in American civics: shut up, take out your paperwork and get in line. Everyone being sworn in was instructed to show up at the ballpark at the same time and funneled in through a single gate, even though they had "appointments" at three different times. Most of these people don't speak English as their primary language. The result was a great deal of confusion and consternation. You can see the many happy, smiling faces in which this resulted in this shot.
	The notices everyone received in the mail told them to report to Gate D for the ceremony, but Gate D was closed and the crowd was told to go to Gate B instead upon arrival. Is this what they mean by "mass migration?"
	In case you didn't know which ballpark you were at, the sign on the Jumbotron was there to remind you, along with a rotating Red Sox logo. There were many reminders throughout the day of how the Red Sox are patriotic. Be a Red Sox fan... be a Red Sox fan... did we mention that you should be a Red Sox fan? Nobody leaves the stadium until they pledge allegiance to the Red Sox, goddamit.
	Once we entered the stadium, those who were being naturalized and their guests were separated into two groups. The immigrants were sent to the left, the guests to the right. The immigrants were tagged with bracelets and nobody lacking such a bracelet was allowed into the half of the stadium where the immigrants were seated... for two hours before the ceremony actually began. The immigrants were, however, allowed to visit their guests in the other half of the stadium. Here, LL makes her way over to sit with me since we were both bored out of our skull as we sat there waiting for something to happen. She later went to the concession stand and brought me food, since there was a concession on the immigrant side of the park and we were told that we shouldn't go back out into the hallway due to problems checking people in. I couldn't get to the concessions until after the ceremony. All in all, it was a zoo!
	Still, LL and I made the best of the situation. That's not saying much... our butts were already going numb by the time this shot was taken. The Venezualan kid sitting behind me was falling asleep. I wouldn't have missed this for anything, though, since it's a marker in LL's life. Even if it was five hours of ritual nonsense that could have been done with a five minute oath and a piece of paper.
	On command, wave those flags! These people aren't immigrants; this is in the guest section. Many tiny cameras were also present. The flags themselves were made in China.
	The very first photo of LL as an American citizen. She looks more American in this shot, doesn't she? The certificate says that she's one of us now (Gooble gobble gooble gobble, one of us... one of us...) As a waitress told her when we went for dinner at the Eastern Standard when LL told her she'd been born in Lebanon, "Welcome to our side." I hadn't known that LL was on the other side previously! But she's 'merkin now.
	The good news: George Dubya Bush's signature didn't appear on the certificate. Some guy from Homeland Security's signature was on it instead, I think. Neither LL nor I had ever heard of him before. We arrived at the stadium at 10:30 AM. It was 3:30 PM when I took this shot. I think it shows in LL"s face here. Still, the paper says she's 'merkin now and, thankfully, doesn't also say that she's a Red Sox fan. I'm sure that part was just an oversight.
	LL washes her hands as an American for the first time. The hand sanitizer she used was made in China.
	LL's first bloody mary... as an American. Nice eyes.
	LL calls her mom in Lebanon for the first time as an American. She still spoke that funny language that's nothing like English, so maybe the waitress was wrong about her being on "our side" now. I'll have to keep an eye on her for the next lifetime or so.
	LL's first raw oyster as an American. The oyster came from Duxbury, MA and not, thankfully, from China. She's eating it at the Eastern Standard restaurant in Boston, which is probably good but man, overpriced. A dozen oysters goes for about $30! A bucket of three dozen goes for $18 in Florida. You do the math. Welcome to America! Still, after the loooooong day, all we wanted were some oysters and a couple of drinks. We didn't even bother checking the menu beforehand. We only went to Eastern Standard because their awning says "oysters" right on the thing.
	On the train from Boston to Worcester; does LL look tired? We finally got home just after 8:00. LL is glad this whole citizenship-seeking song-and-dance is over, as am I. If she had to fill out one more stupid form asking whether she was selling "marihuana" (good morning, 1933!) or working as a prostitute... it wouldn't have been pretty. Best question on the forms? "Have you ever given false testimony." Why even bother asking? If you've given it before, why wouldn't you just give it again?

So, yep, LL is officially American now. She'll always be a Lebaneezer to me, though.

LL's Big Day: New American

2008-09-17T06:50:00.002-04:00

Again, my apologies for not keeping up with this blog lately. That will change very soon. However, it's worth breaking the silence to mention that LL is being sworn in as a US citizen today. Her swearing in will take place at Fenway Park in Boston and her certificate will be signed by Dubya — dual ironies, since she's a liberal Yankees fan.

In any case, there will be words and pictures here after the event. Stay tuned.

Busy with Beetles: Collections and Hypotheses

2008-09-14T08:06:00.004-04:00

I haven't had much free time since returning from Florida, hence the lack of updates here. My schedule this semester is rather packed. For instance, on Thursdays I have two hours of open time between 10 AM and 9 PM which I will be using to eat. It will all work out, but it will also take a couple of weeks for me to get settled into this new calendar. As it stands right now, though, I haven't even had the chance to edit my photos from the trip.

I have, however, finished identifying the beetle specimens to the extent I've been able without molecular work. It's not a bad collection for under a week's time, and a couple of the species are of particular interest for reasons I'll mention below.

Megalodacne heros is without doubt the most visually spectacular of the bunch. It's one of the largest (if not the largest) of the Erotylidae and quite a colorful insect. I collected four specimens from the pore surface of Ganoderma applanatum, which is not nearly so common in Florida as it is in cooler climates. In Florida, it seems to be replaced by species in the Ganoderma lucidum complex. I didn't find M. heros on any other fungi, including the numerous G. applanatum specimens I saw in the field. That might be chance, of course.

A teneb mimic of M. heros, Platydema ellipticus, was also collected from the pore surface of Phellinus gilvus. While this beetle is substantially smaller than Megalodacne, it has what I suspect is aposematic coloration. That is to say, natural selection has favored individuals with markings similar to the larger and more toxic erotylid in this particular teneb. Five specimens of this insect came back with me.

Platydema nigratum is a close relative of the above. It doesn't have much going for it in terms of coloration, but this is an exciting find for me for two reasons. First, the habitat of this beetle is uncertain. I can say definitively that I collected it from between fruiting bodies of Stereum ostrea, and I watched one specimen chewing on that fungus. I have no doubt at all that it is a fungivore and macrophagous at that. Second, the larva of this species isn't described in the literature. I recovered a specimen of what I believe will turn out to be a larval P. nigratum from within the fleshy base of a relatively large S. ostrea sporophore. Once I've sequenced both adult and larva I should be able to connect the two definitively.

I collected numerous specimens of Neomida bicornis from two fungi. I first found them inside the same G. applanatum sporophores that had Megalodacne on their surface. I found specimens again several days later living in the context of Trametes elegans, a particularly fleshy member of the same genus that contains the ubiquitous turkey tail, T. versicolor. An interesting thing happened when I collected N. bicornis from that fungus that I wish I had noticed in the field. When I first started collecting, I found six specimens and put them in a microtube. Then I noticed additional galleries and collected fourteen more specimens in a second tube. When I brought them all back to the lab, it turned out that all six specimens in the first tube were male and all fourteen in the second were female. The probability of this happening purely by chance is so small that it suggests to me that males and females were segregated for some reason at the moment that I found the insects. I know nothing about the behavior of N. bicornis; I doubt that anyone has really investigated it. Also, it's worth noting that the specimens from Florida are very, very different from what's called N. bicornis in New England, which I've collected from Pycnoporus cinnibarinus at Wachusett. The Floridian specimens have an orange prothorax and males have straight horns. The New England version is dark metallic green and the male's horns are slightly curved. There's a chance, I think, that the two are really two different species and, indeed, I don't find any sequences for Neomida in EntrezGene other than one for a basidiomycete yeast from its gut discovered by Suh and Blackwell. I'm looking forward to pulling sequences from the northern and southern "morphs." If they do turn out to be two different species, I think I get to name one of them. The two insects look so different that I find it hard to believe they could be the same species.

I also found a second Neomida, N. ferruginea, in the context of a second G. applanatum sporophore. I only recovered one specimen of this rather drab little teneb, though. When I eventually do the phylogeny from the genus, I suspect that this beetle will be more closely related to the southern "morph" of N. bicornis than it is to the one from New England. That's just a hunch, of course.

Of course, no teneb hunting expedition would be complete without the recovery of a couple of specimens of Bolitotherus cornutus. I collected specimens of the widely-distributed beetle from both G. applanatum (the same cluster of fruiting bodies above) and G. lucidum on this trip. B. cornutus seems to be the most successful of the larger fungus-dependent tenebs of North America based on my experience. I can hardly help but find the insects whenever I search polypores. The genus, and in fact the whole tribe, is quite small as compared to other teneb tribes, but Bolitotherus seems to be the champ in sheer numbers. Having some specimens from Florida will give me the chance to eventually compare sequences from specimens from three states. Perhaps I'll someday investigate population genetic structure in this insect, which doesn't get around much but seems to be everywhere.

I also have a couple of specimens that I haven't been able to identify beyond family yet, including a few of what are probably Nitidulidae but are potentially Leiodidae, too. I'm hoping for the former, though. Nitidulidae seems to be a family with taxa in transition between feeding on the sap from tree wounds and living on the polypores that grow from those wounds. Most beetle families have hind feet with five segments (tarsomeres). Tenebrionidae, which I've hypothesized to be primitively macrofungivorous, have only four. Nitidulidae still have five, but many species in the family have a markedly decreased fourth tarsomere, so one can imagine a scenario in which the transition from living on the surface of a fungus and eating the hymenium (Erotylidae) leaves the beetles with five tarsomeres, there's a transitional state in which the fourth (or other) tarsomere is reduced as the beetles begin to tunnel into the fungi (Nitidulidae) and, ultimately, the tarsomere is lost entirely over time as a fully fungus-exploiting lifestyle is adopted (Tenebrionidae).

One of the fungi I collected also turned out to be an unusual specimen. A glossy, brown, trametes-like, sessile thing with subdaedaloid pores turned out to be the tropical Nigroporus vinosus. Nobody in my lab has seen it before. One of the ongoing projects in the lab is the exploration of wood-decaying fungi (N. vinosus is a white-rotter) for use in bioremediation. It may be worthwhile to mount another trip to look for unusual species to be cultured in this regard, too. We'll see about that. I'm planning on going back again at some point, anyhow, and perhaps swinging around the Gulf Coast a bit in the future to sample both polypores and beetles from more climes. I've barely scratched the surface here, after all.

Clearly, I've got a ton of work to do, and I haven't even really started yet... hence my absence from the blogosphere of late. Rest assured, though, that situation is only temporary. I have no intention of disappearing just yet!

When Civilizations Die

2008-09-09T10:02:00.003-04:00

This is what a civilization in its death throes looks like:

Sarah Palin's Churches and The Third Wave from Bruce Wilson on Vimeo.>
This is the future imagined by John McCain and Sarah Palin.

This is bad. This is very, very bad.

I'd rather vote for Cthulhu.