Best protest signs evar. My favorites:
I think we all know how I feel about the Hypnotoad.
I think I have that one somewhere in the back basement room, too!
Comic book geeks 14, Westboro Baptist Church 1.
Friday, July 23rd, 2010Time Travelling God Particles
Saturday, October 31st, 2009I’m no theoretical physicist, but I was a member of the institutional science community. My particular bullshit field was “artificial intelligence,” but in the modern university, bullshit fields abound–sometimes with legitimate scientific endeavors buried within, or as an umbrella above, the bullshit.
I predict that large tracts of present-day physics research will be revealed as an exercise in mathematical masturbation–a sort of ueber-complex sudoku puzzle that only .001% of humanity has the intellect and training to attempt solving. The sudoku metaphor can be extended to include the relevance of the solution to our questions about the nature of reality.
I’ll admit, I don’t have the mathematical chops to follow, replicate, or disprove the work of theoretical physicists. My skepticism of their work stems from more primary methodological concerns. Of primary concern is the lack of testable hypotheses–a feature found also in rank mysticism.
and then there’s this:
A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather. (NY Times 10/12/09)
One of the two pysicists is Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. You probably recognize from his famous proposal that the Veneziano model was actually a theory of strings*. A distinguished physicist indeed.
Nielson along with Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto (less famous–doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry) propose that Higgs boson particles created by scientists in the future, travel backwards through time to prevent scientists in the present from discovering them.
Seriously.
Now I’m the first to sympathize with scientists forced to use metaphor. Communicating an absurdly complicated topic to an untrained public is challenging. I’m also sympathetic to the problem of the media in relating these metaphors to the public: how literal are they meant to be taken? Is the cat *really* alive and dead at the same time? Is space *actually* a rubber matt displaced by bowling balls? And so forth.
But, as far as I can tell, the Terminator metaphor above is meant to be taken literally. Just substitute Higgs boson for Arnold, and anything-to-do-with-discovering-Higgs-boson for Sarah Connor.
The list of things sabotage possibly engineered by Higgs: the cancellation of the planned Superconducting Supercollider in the US in 1993, the various mechanical problems of the Large Hadron Collider, and the arrest of a resident physicist on suspcion of Al-Qaeda affiliation.
Seriously.
Of course, thinking like scientists, they’ve come up with a plan–a peer reviewed, up-for-publication-in-a-real-journal plan. It goes a little something like this:
- Create a deck of 1 million cards.
- Write “Procede” on 999,999 of the cards.
- Write “STOP” on 1 card.
- Shuffle.
- Draw a card.
If the card says “STOP,” then it supports the claim that Higgs boson(s) are emanating from the future to stop scientists from creating them, and we should design more experiments so that Higgs, from the future, can tell scientists how they should proceed with their experiments.
I think it’s a great experiment, but I would go the additional step of not including the “STOP” card. That would really cinch it. As a “real time” way you provide Higgs input on HLC activity, you could have a grad students continuously flipping coins. If one of them comes up heads one million times in a row then we know Higgs thinks we’re going too far. Or, with nearly the same degree of scientific rigor, we could have a seance. I’m willing to be the conduit through which the Higgs boson can make its will known to our world.
Seriously.
*I had no idea who he was either.
**Since it would cost, like, a billionth as much as their other bullshit experiments, why haven’t they done it?
Make Your Case
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009I’m Agnostic, and have been for quite some time. I don’t think that God exists, but I’d be willing to look at any new evidence.
Right now I’m reading “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement” by Katherine Joyce, and I keep running into a problem- I cannot understand these people at all. I can understand them as well as I understand gyroscopes: I can describe to you what they are going to do, but for the life of you I can’t wrap my mind why.
For those of you who don’t know “Quiverfull” is a blanket term regarding people who are believers in a Biblical Patriarchy (women submit to their husbands or fathers- and I do mean “submit”), and more importantly, who are staunchly anti-birth control; no condoms, no pills, no sterilization, no rhythm method, nothing but “God’s Will”. The phrase comes from Psalm 127:5 “Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them(children). They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate.” Quiverfull people believe that they are in a cultural war with liberal secularists, and they intended to win through demographics alone. They believe that these roles and behaviors are “god’s will” and that they are on the side of righteousness. Frequently, they are into seriously modest dress and homeschooling.
I keep running into the same problem with these beliefs- I don’t understand why they would want to worship this god. I’m fairly anti-authoritarian: I want to choose which authority I follow, and at the end of the day I think I am ultimately responsible for any action I take, whether or not someone in power over me told me to do it or not. I don’t want to risk my health and my life. I am drawn towards debate, and I am occasionally smarter than my husband. These proscribed roles, in other words, would make me MISERABLE (and my husband miserable too). So, if the Quiverfull people are correct, and there is a god, and he made me the exact opposite of what I’m supposed to be (indeed, a lot of Quiverfull talk about how women have an inherently rebellious nature because of Eve), which sounds like a recipe for misery, then god’s a dick. Why should I worship a dick? The general answer of “because of heaven and hell” is 100% unsatisfying to me- I’m supposed to toady up to a bully just to avoid getting beat up? That’s not moral- that’s cowardly.
So, this post is for any lurking Quiverfulls. Heck, if you’re just a person who thinks god cares more about what we do with our genitals than whether or not we hurt people, you can post too. I’ll leave off the “prove that god even exists part”- for this exercise I’ll just go with it for now. I need support for “if god exists, why should we worship him?” Make your case.
EDIT: Like all things I want to know, I had to search google to see if it had any knowledge. The first website had a post that made exactly zero sense to me, but the answer was
We worship Him because He commands it. We worship Him because He alone deserves it, knowing what He is and what He does. We worship Him because without so doing we cannot rise to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
So…yeah, worship a bully because a bully says so? Even though he’s a bully? And I don’t want to be a bully?
I really wish I knew someone in real life who held these views and would talk to me. I’m missing something important here- something that’d snap it into place.
A Cheery Hanukkah Present.
Monday, December 22nd, 2008A survivor of sexual abuse is suing the Vatican, and two courts in the U.S. are considering hearing the case.
“I was not truly mad at the right person,” he says. “I kept going up a ladder, and I was looking at cardinals and even the Pope knew, you know, that this was this bad. That’s what truly upset me.”
Now Turner is in court again — suing the Vatican.— Abuse Victims Seek Court Date
Apparently, it’s remarkable that the Vatican might be held to account for its systemic concealment of sexual abusers. Which rather highlights the utter stupidity of giving an already large and powerful religion its own country to play with. Let’s start with this fucked up, patriarchal institution with enormous wealth, resources, and devotees so brainwashed so as to make most generals salivate. Then, let’s give it sovereign immunity and treat it as an equal amongst nations. That’s going to work great.
It’s almost enough to make you think that all the Zionist conspiracy theories floating around are ultimately encouraged by the Church, to keep people from delving too deeply into what, exactly, all those funny old men in point hats are doing.
The Revised Church of Homophobia
Thursday, December 4th, 2008I am tired of the tiptoeing around and kid glove treatment that these assholes automatically get because they associate themselves with Jesus. Spare me this holiday season–please?
No? Well, let me help you, then.
and
There–much more accurate. Don’t they want their message gotten across more clearly? I’m sure they do!
*The pope also says, Stop touching each other before Mass–we can’t tell which of you are Teh Homos when you do that!
How I Learned that the “P” in “PZ Myers” Stands for Paul
Saturday, July 12th, 2008I’ve been following the Frackin’ Cracker story since its first appearance on the news, even before PZ’s first post on the subject. It’s turned into quite the bloody saga of PZ-hating (not to mention creative ways to desecrate a Holy Cracker) out there, with…oh, you guessed it…our bestest buddy Billdo carrying the lead torch and pitchfork to storm Pharyngula’s walls!
(First Kyso’s “ilk” and now PZ’s…wonder how many “ilks” I can associate myself with…I’m such a wannabe “ilker,” I’m ashamed, ashamed I tell you. I need to find my own person to offend.)
But anyway, PZ mentioned yesterday that there might be some mention of him in the Washington Times today. In case anyone was wondering what it would take for me to actually go online and deliberately try to find something written in the Washington Times, this is the first time that’s ever happened.
(A small side story: when I first moved to the DC area years and years ago, I bought a subscription to the Washington Post–even in Bumfuck Kansas where I grew up, I’d heard of the Post. My husband at the time remarked sniffily that I wasn’t going to get a complete unbiased picture of the news if all I did was read that bastion of blatant liberality and I should really also get a subscription to the Times as well–as I recall, he was motivated to suggest this from something some radio talk show host dude named G. Gordon Liddy said on his program. I pointed out to him that said dude might possibly have a personal reason to slam the Post, but I went ahead and bought a subscription to the Times anyway. I even tried to take the articles contained therein seriously, peppered with typos and grammatical errors as they were, but found myself unable to really swallow anything presented in such an incredibly unprofessional way regardless of the content that I gave up after a few issues. Maybe they’ve improved their print copy since then, though?)
Struck gold, too!
Professor solicits hosts to desecrate
With a super-cute picture of PZ even.
And I also now know that his first name is Paul. 
An anti-religion Minnesota biology professor expects to receive dozens of consecrated Communion wafers in response to his public solicitation that people send him the hosts in order that he may publicly desecrate them.
They clearly pulled the wrong picture out of the archives. This one’s way more in the spirit of the story:
The University of Minnesota is coming over as pretty cool and sane, though, in spite of the obvious attempts by whomever was interviewing them to get them to say something juicy. Check it out.
Pro-life, unless it’s the lives of poor people
Thursday, June 5th, 2008Short version: Sarasota Planned Parenthood and Habitat for Humanity team up with a plan that will help Planned Parenthood with some zoning issues and help Habitat get some almost-free land. For their altruism, they’re repaid with the nastiest of the nasty anti-choice contingent:
“We could have put up any building we wanted,” said Barbara Zdravecky, president of Planned Parenthood. “We wanted to donate the land so Habitat could build more attainable housing.”
But after Habitat donors learned about it and complained, Habitat International told the local board to drop it. The local Habitat board dropped the deal Tuesday night, less than a month before it was set for a final vote by the city.
…
The barrage of e-mails started with James Sedlak, vice president of the American Life League, a Virginia-based group that has led protests at Planned Parenthood offices in Sarasota. They said it showed a cozy relationship between Habitat and Planned Parenthood, which the league has accused of pushing pornography to children, among other things.
The American Life League must be so pleased. They’ve managed to screw over woman and poor people in one fell swoop.
Donate to Habitat, but let them know how you feel about them caving to pressure from anti-woman nutjobs.
Hat tip: nom_de_grr.
Never Underestimate the Power of Girl Cooties
Saturday, May 31st, 2008I’d be shocked and disgusted, if only I cared more about the Catholic church or even about the moral sensibilities of the people who want to be a part of it.
Catholic church says it’s following Christian tradition
You can’t argue with that.
The decree was published Thursday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which in a headline called the ordination of women a “crime.”
‘Nuff said.
The Pope Was In the ‘House!
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008And I heard that the American Atheists had a sweet spot staked out for protest…of course today would be the day that my boss, in a fit of responsible behavior, failed to cancel our monthly departmental meeting like he was supposed to (he’s cancelled ‘em like clockwork every month since last September, dammit!). So in short, I couldn’t go. But all was not lost–the boyfriend flung himself boldly in the breach (he works just outside DC) and armed with my digital camera (which I neglected to supply with fresh batteries before handing over to him, oops, but he resourcefully hit a Rite Aid on his way to the Metro station) he nipped over to the protest site in my stead.
Now, I do understand that a big part of the character of most atheist types is an aversion to being a “joiner.” Yep, I do understand that…but c’MON, folks, he says that the area staked out was easily big enough for 200 people!…so that the 35 or so who showed up were kinda ambling around their large empty space in polite nerdy silence, triangulated between those in an ecstasy of Catholic wish fulfillment (a horde, on both sides) and to the rear a large loud vocal contingent of anti-Catholic Christians who spent a lot of time shouting “Celibacy is Demonic!” (Not that I don’t feel that way about it myself, especially when it’s mine and it’s involuntary.) However, he did snap a few shots of two of the more distinctive atheists present (see below) as well as a policeman who, in spite of the far more vigorous crowds surrounding the tiny atheist contingent, kept his video camera aimed at Teh Godless the whole freakin’ time. The cops shooed them all away before noon, so no Pope pics. Oh well…
I thought we were aborting all the Jesus haters…
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007After finally watching “Jesus Camp” this week, I’d been feeling a little depressed about the ability of America’s younger generations to resist the ego-stroking glitz of evangelical Christianity. Never before have humans been so good at soaking guilt and repression in the syrupy goodness of Vanilla Ice-style pop and the joy of breaking stuff; how could any kid be expected to turn his or her nose up at it?
To combat their message, I’d been working up my own atheist rap-metal single called “Abortin’ Your Soul” with my band, The Self-Loathing Pastors. Thanks to Sara Robinson at Orcinus, though, I can shelve my secular stylings. She discovered a study done by the Barna Group, an Evangelical polling and research firm, that shows younger generations turning away from Christianity in droves.
The Barna chart says it all:
Perhaps as importantly, Sara notes that the folks who aren’t identifying as Christians have grown fed up with fundie baloney:
Ten years ago, “the vast majority” of non-Christians had generally favorable views of Christianity. Now, that number stands at just 16%. When asked specifically about Evangelicals, the number are even worse: only 3% of non-Christian Millennials have positive associations with Evangelicals. Among the Boomers, it’s eight times higher.
When Kinnaman asked senior pastors if they were seeing this too, half of them told him that, yes, they are finding their work to be an uphill battle — “because people are increasingly hostile and negative toward Christianity.” And his research bore this out. When he ranked young non-Christians’ most common perceptions of Christianity, nine of the 12 most common attributes they named were negative ones. According to the study, “Common negative perceptions include that present-day Christianity is judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%), and too involved in politics (75%).”
I have to disagree with old fashioned, though. This is wicked fresh:
How Barney the Priest ruined Christmas
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006I’m going to shock you with something heretofore unthought and unspoken in the blogosphere: Dawn Eden…
hates fun.
Take Catholic mass. (Please.)
Catholic mass is where old people go to die in peace. It’s where parents go to smack children for not entering a trance for 75 consecutive minutes. It’s where songs about praising god are sung in the tone you use to chastise your dog for peeing on the rug.
If you don’t leave mass with sore knees, a vague sense of self-loathing, and almost no memory of what transpired over the last hour-plus, you aren’t a Catholic. And Dawn Eden and friends will have you know that if you try to spice up mass in any way, you might as well be dipping your wick in the wineblood.
Recently, Dawn proudly published a letter sent by one of her friends/readers/drones to a priest that dared conduct a Halloween mass in a Barney costume. The indignant author of the letter is a former Anglican priest who decided to go Catholic (presumably for the extra guilt) and states:
What I am trying to show you is that most of what is done on Halloween has NO Christian background and therefore, your use of costumes on the Sunday before All Hallows Eve was completely absurd and a degradation of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. You should be ashamed of yourself.
The envy is palpable. Barney’s more popular than Jesus, and he spends all kinds of alone time with small kids. Most priests must loathe that lucky fucking dinosaur. And I bet this former priest is absolutely kicking himself for not thinking of capitalizing on Barney’s advantages via the Halloween costume idea before leaving the cloth, and his jealousy has driven him into a holy rage against the man who did.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game!
Unfortunately, the former priest should’ve used better logic than what was quoted above, because I’m afraid there’s another little holiday that also has no Christian background. It involves cutting down and decorating a tree in a practice that was verboten for centuries. It uses mistletoe, a fertility charm of the Druids. It happens around the same time as the mid-December festival of Saturnalia, which already involved the giving of gifts. In fact, the 25th of December was the very popular birthdate already attributed to Mithra when the Church miraculously gave it to Jesus 353 years after he croaked.
So are we sure we should let our petty grudges lead us down the path of shaming people for celebrating holidays with no Christian background? Because if we do, I’m afraid you’ll have to give up a lot more than your Barney fantasies, dude.
As with all moral codes of practice, the Hypocratic Oath failed to prohibit cheese whizz
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006I was rather surprised to see J Train in the comments at Pandagon whip this out
Shouldn’t this kind of thing put a doctor’s medical license in jeopardy?I can’t imagine why. In general, unless a patient’s life or health is in immediate danger (and pregnancy doesn’t count), he’s under no obligation to write any prescription for anything. It’s his choice to make, just as it’s my choice to find another doctor, or (in my case) to not refer any of my patients to him.
Now why this logic surprised me, especially from someone who says they’re a doctor, is because this logic means that, due to how a person will not drop down dead immeidately upon contracting HIV, any time critical medications that could be used to stop a person contracting the virus in a short period of time immediately after they’re been exposed to potential infection is something which doctors are allowed to refuse their patients, even if refusing them and referring them on will lead to their patient contracting HIV.
But of course it is in fact perfectly moral silly heads. We know this because people who are very adamant about telling us that they’re Not, I repeat, NOT, Moral Relativists (and are definately not kantian nihilists) like those Dirty Jews Godless Liberals, also happen to hold the view that they are allowed to take away a women’s access to medication that will stop them suffering a life threatening medical condition, because they do not understand that there is a difference between an abortifacient and a contraceptive.
Cue Scientologist Pharmacists and Doctors refusing to prescribe anti-psych meds to schizaphrenics because they believe that mental illness is the result of psychic aliens. Sweet Chocolate Cthulhu (who commands me to take Plan B after I have a condom malfunction btw) forbid we let actual medical knowledge get in the way of made up theology now
And of course, the teeny tiny, ever so slight, basic medical fact that Plan B is not, never was, and will never be, an abortifacient is why of course I was some what perplexed by the next comment by J Train:
Is there any way we can send these pricks a complimentary copy of the Hypocratic (not hypocritic) Oath, as in FIRST DO NO HARM?Oddly enough, the original Hippocratic Oath (which does not contain the line about doing no harm) includes a very specific line about not giving anything to produce an abortion. (Not to conflate abortion and Plan B.) This is one of the many reasons why the Oath is very archaic and is almost never used in its original form.
Emphasis mine because it’s just Sooo delicious, “Let me conflate Plan B and Abortion (Though I wouldn’t want to conflate Plan B and abortion or anything)”, Thank you Doctor J for that, do not let your blithering be affect by the fact that, due to the original Hypocratic Oath (not to be confused with any of the other, more modern Hypocratic Aaths, which do not, like women’s right to personhood, exist thanks to the wonders of sperm magic) having a strict prohibition against abortion, that stopping a woman from obtaining a contraceptive, like Plan B, is also prohibited, please.
Now no doubt some will object to pregnancy being compared to HIV though, and you would have a slight point, pregnancy is much less deadly than HIV, or Small Pox, or the 1918 flu pandemic, it is, I must admit, truly a pussy cat compared to many hideously deadly illnesses.
And to qualify that and to paraphrase Marx even; if by “people”, you mean rich white women with medical insurance, then it kills nearly no one at all.
If, however, you mean actual people, with functioning brains and everything, then it kills a few hundred women a year, in america, disproportionally black women too, and in fact kills women in an inverse proportion to how much pre-natal care they can afford during the pregnancy.
Which I believe, if my math holds, is slightly more than, say, erectile dysfuntion.
But again, I come up agaist the great wall of logic which means that medical decisions that are made doctors who actively refuse to accept modern medical facts, preferring instead an ad hoc made up reality in which Plan B dismembers and feeds to Joe Lieberman proto-humanoid lifeforms, and favors this pan-medical view in such a way that it threatens the life of their patients even, are not in any way criminally negligent.
Any Lawyers in the house? Is there a reason why we can’t sue (or whatever) a doctor for reckless endangerment or some such, given that this bullshit will eventually lead to some women who’s ethics do not allow her to abort, dying during an otherwise avoidable pregnancy? If neccesary we can declare this attack on women’s bodily autonomy “pornographic” and set Zombie Andrea Dworkin on it, but seriously, this seems like something we could work through the courts to defeat, why aren’t we?
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