Pharyngula

Episode CXVIII: Who says Catholic white boys can't rap?

Category: Open Thread

Let us transition from yet another piece of the gargantuan thread to something about the Catholic mass.

(Current totals: 11,170 entries with 1,153,477 comments.)

Oh, joy — it's squid TV!

Category: Cephalopods • Organisms

Yes! You can watch the giant squid episode of Inside Nature's Giants. There's a little squeeing going on in my hotel room right now, I'm just glad no one else is here to record me.

Posted by PZ Myers at 11:43 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Poll to determine who saved the miners in Chile

Category: Pointless polls

You'd think this one is a no-brainer; a Chilean newspaper is asking who was responsible for rescuing the trapped miners, miracles (milagro) or science (ciencia).

El rescate de los mineros en Chile fue para usted más:

Milagro 49.5%
Ciencia 50.5%

I didn't see any miracles on TV. I saw lots of engineering and mining technology, though.

Posted by PZ Myers at 8:20 AM • 220 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Friday Cephalopod: Watch out, I have a squid gun and I'm not afraid to use it!

Category: Cephalopods • Organisms

Via National Geographic, which also offers this video of Humboldt Squid Wrestling.

Posted by PZ Myers at 6:15 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Fancy that, a fabulous map

Category: Art • Science

This is beautiful, I'd hang it on my wall. It's a genetic map of the first synthetic organism, and it and many others will be on display in the Serpentine Gallery in London this weekend.

And gosh, what do you know, I am going to be in London this weekend! I may have to sneak out of The Amazing Meeting a bit, which is going to be hard to do since it's so jam-packed with cool people and cool stuff, but some of them might want to join me in a little extracurricular travel as well.

Posted by PZ Myers at 4:28 PM • 45 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

I doubt that, Douthat

Category: Environment • Politics

Ross Douthat proposes an explanation for why Republicans are so wacky on climate change. He points out that there's a strong strain of climate change denial in the American public, one that's also present in other countries.

What's interesting, though, is that if you look at public opinion on climate change, the U.S. isn't actually that much of an outlier among the wealthier Western nations. In a 2007-2008 Gallup survey on global views of climate change, for instance, just 49 percent of American told pollsters that human beings are responsible for global warming. But the same figure for Britain (where Rush Limbaugh has relatively few listeners, I believe) was 48 percent, and belief in human-caused climate change was only slightly higher across northern Europe: 52 percent in the Czech Republic, 59 percent in Germany, 49 percent in Denmark, 51 percent in Austria, just 44 percent in the Netherlands, with highs of 63 percent in France and 64 percent in Sweden.

OK, let's provisionally accept that. Where Douthat goes next, though, is weird; he argues that it is an advantage of our political leaders in the US that they are more representative of the electorate, and that our politicians are simply tracking polls to win votes.

It's all nonsense. Kooky right-wingers like Inhofe and Angle and Miller and Rubio and on and on are not canny, cunning politicians who are cynically following the wishes of the people — they are True Believers, ideologues who promote, rather than merely follow. What it really indicates is that Republican voters are willing to put morons into office, while voters in all those other Western nations retain some dignity and insist on a louder hint of credibility in their representatives.

It's also not true that the Republican leadership better reflects the popular consensus. "97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming, but 97% of GOP Senate candidates disagree." What it actually tells us is that Republicans are more willing to charge off into the fringe than the general electorate.

And most importantly, climate change is a scientific issue, one that has an evidence-based answer, not something that can be swayed by popular opinion. It is not a virtue to to obey the whims of an ignorant populace to pursue a position contrary to fact.

Posted by PZ Myers at 12:32 PM • 171 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Belgian archbishop represents the church's love

Category: Religion

Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard has written a book in which he reveals Catholic thinking about AIDS.

The Archbishop who is seen as a conservative does not pull his punches. Speaking about AIDS he says that this is a kind "immanent justice".

I note that the archbishop is probably mortal, and appears to be aging. If he someday suffers miserably from a prostate cancer that is ripping his guts apart, I hope he finds comfort in it as a kind of "immanent justice". If he should suffer a massive stroke and his brain should bleed and fail, I hope he has a last moment of awareness to appreciate the "immanent justice" of his fate. I hope that if one day he is crossing the street and suddenly finds a bus roaring implacably in his direction, that the destination on the bus's sign reads "Immanent Justice".

We're all going to die. Labeling our ends as the conscious acts of a vengeful god and treating the inevitable as an outcome contingent on our respect for religious mores is one of the oldest tricks in the book of pious lies.

Posted by PZ Myers at 10:11 AM • 215 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Scotland should make the Discovery Institute squirm

Category: Creationism

Scotland now has its very own outpost of inanity, the Centre for Intelligent Design. It's wonderfully revealing. The Discovery Institute takes great pains to hide their roots in evangelical Christianity — they want you to believe that their ideas are objective and secular, unwarped by religious ideology — but as soon as they leave the nest in Seattle, the mask seems to get lost at the airport and what emerges is simply Old Time Religion. This happened in Dover, where the creationists on the ground were simply using the rationalizations of Intelligent Design creationism to cover their fundamentalism, and now it's happening in Scotland.

The article is hilarious. All the organizers of this new institute proudly put their evangelical Christian credentials front and center, and then they define ID:

Generally, proponents of intelligent design think a god created living matter and established the rules of the universe to guide its development.

Meanwhile, backstage, Stephen Meyer and Philip Johnson and all the other lyin' rascals at the DI are flapping their hands frantically and going, "Shhhh, shhhh, shhhhh!" to get their European friends to shut up and stop giving away the game. They would never accept that definition, because they're desperate to hide the fact that their entire movement is religiously motivated.

Posted by PZ Myers at 9:11 AM • 74 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Who needs a bar of soap and shoe polish when you've got the good book?

Category: Weirdness

Somebody should send this image to the jail in Berkeley County, SC. This is what happens if you let prisoners have bibles.

Posted by PZ Myers at 8:42 AM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks