A nice little ditty from Pharyngula, with a great caption:

It sounds horrific, but it’s a matter of pulling a tube out of a flask of liquid nitrogen and putting it in the trash. That’s what the Religious Right is getting all worked up about.

PZ rocks, as usual…

“But no, you don’t understand — it’s murder, plain and simple.” Yeah, right.

One further example of why people in the media need to take a philosophy of science course…

Taller people are smarter: study

NEW YORK (Reuters) – While researchers have long shown that tall people earn more than their shorter counterparts, it’s not only social discrimination that accounts for this inequality — tall people are just smarter than their height-challenged peers, a new study finds. “As early as age three — before schooling has had a chance to play a role — and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests,” wrote Anne Case and Christina Paxson of Princeton University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. [...] “As adults, taller individuals are more likely to select into higher paying occupations that require more advanced verbal and numerical skills and greater intelligence, for which they earn handsome returns,” they wrote.

The usual (obvious) disclaimers are often revealed eventually in the story — almost as an afterthought…

The research confirms previous studies that show that early nutrition is an important predictor of intelligence and height. “Prenatal care and prenatal nutrition are just incredibly important, even more so than we already knew,” Case said in an interview.

These disclaimers are important, because they show another problem with this type of reporting, i.e., the non-discussion of important socio-economic variables (i.e., poor people, prenatal care, and general nutrition, for starters).

I’d much rather see comprehensive studies of nutrition-cognitive-testing-correlations, and then really expand on the connections to resources available in lower socio-economic areas. The math at that point would be relatively clear — and would point to something far different from the pissant research this study provides.

Taller people are smarter? Shame on you, Princeton…

Because she is so filled with Betty Crocker goodness.

Happy Friday!

[Sorry, Keith.]

So I was thinking about the Carlin video and how he says, “What’s the point of having a Divine Plan if every rundown schmuck with a two-dollar prayer book can come along and fuck up your plan?”

And then I got to thinking about some of gawd’s other quirky modus operandi. And for the life of me, I really got stuck on this zinger.

See if you can channel Carlin with me for this one. Gawd made us in his image. I mean, literally made us in his image. Which means we look like him. But even more important, means he looks like US.

Now if this big, scary, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being that lives in the ether somewhere looked just like one of us, what’s with these shows with all the pomp and circumstance when he does something? First of all, he hasn’t bothered to make any real significant entry in several thousand years. And even then, he copped out and did things like send his son along to deliver the message, make him walk on water and multiply bread and wine. To quote Carlin: these things do not belong on the resume of a supreme being. Even Mohammed couldn’t get something as paltry as a mountain to come to him, so he had to go to the mountain. Lame.

Sure. You go farther back and you have a few big things. Noah, Moses and their gangs had some style. Big-ass floods. Destruction of towers — wow, Muslim terrorists know how to do that one on their own now, huh? Parting of seas (but just wait for what you see global warming’s gonna do in 10-20 years). Burning bushes… that talk.

Now come on. Is this The Wizard of Oz or some shit? Why all the fire and brimstone? If he made us to look like him, why doesn’t he just step out from behind the bush looking like John Cleese or something and say, “Oh, hello. I’m gawd. Came to tell you a few things. Let’s see, um… Don’t kill. Don’t have sex with farm animals…”

Again, as Carlin would say, it would kind of help the credibility along a bit.

But there are other disturbing issues. If we are exactly in his image, does he have nipples? Does he have a belly button and a willie? What ever for? I mean, the Olympian gawds actually came down and shagged mortals now and again. This guy doesn’t seem to go in for that. And why would Adam and Eve have belly buttons like in all the depictions I have ever seen? What purpose would they have served?

Then there are a few other physical issues worth questioning. So we are made in his image, which follows that he looks pretty much like us.

Does he have a beard? Does it ever need shaving? Does he get freckles?

I notice he doesn’t cover his shoulders much in those old paintings. Always in a toga. How many millions of years until those turn cancerous on him? Also, does he have all the physical traits with none of the drawbacks? Never gets love handles? Look down at his arms and he has fingernails that never need clipping, sinewy veins that never get clogged no matter what crap fried food he eats? Press your hand on his chest and feel a heart that beats endlessly, till the twilight of time itself? Does he have a nice, firm butt? How well-hung is he? And again, why would he need to be? Is the Holy Ghost a horny bugger when the lights go out at night?

What’s more, if we are literally made in his image, why did he come up with all this shit that our bodies can do to us? I assume gawd can’t get Lyme disease or malaria or HIV. So he made us in his image and just removed all the parts that could keep us healthy? “Oh, sorry. I love you, my child, but I think I will allow you to grow boils and goiters and get warts and pink-eye and gout. Sorry!”

If he exists, he in fact invented the mosquito… The most vile creature on earth. It waits till you are asleep at night, flies down and lands on your skin — and the female of the species sucks your blood for nutrition. Almost as vile as any evil creature cooked up by the most depraved science fiction writer. Not only that, but he covered the world with them in the trillions and made them the carriers of horrid diseases. If they were only about three or four times larger, they would have wiped our species off the face of the earth by now. Ewwww! This guy is twisted.

These are the works of a loving gawd who had a divine plan and made us in his image?

Did he also do finger painting with Hieronymus Bosch?? Jesus H. Christ!

Maybe gawd is just a girl who can’t say no…. And all those millions of schmucks with two-dollar prayer books have made life so horrible for the rest of us!

(Dopey McWingnut opens prayer book.)

Dopey: Um, God?

God: Yes, son?

Dopey: I want you to create a horrible blood-sucking insect.

God: Um. Okay, son.

Dopey: I want you to make them travel in swarms and be attracted to stagnant water. So when people are half-naked in the middle of the summer, these insects will be a horrible nuisance.

God: Okay, if you say so. Sounds a little harsh.

Dopey: And I want you to make them carry terrible diseases, like Malaria and West Nile Virus.

God: Okay, son, aren’t we going a little too far?

Dopey: It’s my prayer, goddamn it!

God: Sigh. Whatever you wish, son. Anything else?

Dopey: I want the only way to get rid of these pests to be an obscure Avon-manufactured skin lotion.

God: What?? Why??

Dopey: My cousin sells it through a pyrimid scheme in Hoboken. He’ll get fucking rich.

God: Oh, I see! Thy will be done, my son.

Dopey: Thanks, Goddo. Always good to chat with ya.

God: Thanks for calling. Love you.

Dopey: Yeah. Thanks a lot there, bud.

(Click. Dial tone.)

(Thanks to Peganus for sending this in.)

Katherine Harris, the vicious fucking asshole who subverted our democracy and handed the 2000 election to George W. Bush, seems to think that the very idea of the separation of church and state is a lie.

In a lengthy interview with Florida Baptist Witness, struggling U.S. Senate candidate Katherine Harris asserts, among other things, that the separation of church and state is a fallacy.

“We have to have the faithful in government and over time,” the Witness quotes Harris as saying, “that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.”

Gee, and here I had this crazy little idea that a democracy meant government by the people and for the people. I dunno. I think I heard that somewhere once. I thought theocracies were run by invisible gawds (or the clergy that speak for them, since the gawds don’t actually exist). After 40 years of living in a democracy, I’ve had it all wrong?

Excerpted answers from the interview follow:

On civil rights for gays: “Civil rights have to do with individual rights and I don’t think they apply to the gay issues. I have not supported gay marriage and I do not support any civil rights actions with regard to homosexuality.”

Because, gay people are not actual individuals. They might not even be people. No civil rights whatsoever? So, say a police officer pulls over a gay person for speeding. Without reading him his Miranda rights or anything, he should be able to lock him up indefinitely because he feels like it’s an appropriate thing to do with a gay person? Are you out of your fucking mind? People who spew such mindless shit from their mouths as you do should be barred from American politics forever.

When asked if abortion is a moral evil: “Yes. Because it’s a life, it’s a life. Life begins at conception.”

What life? Beginning when? Do you use hair products that were tested on tortured animals? What about those lives? How about life-saving drugs that were first tested out on mice and bunnies and even dogs? What about those lives? Oh. They aren’t human. And human blastocysts are magical. Ever notice when a deer or a horse is born it can walk in just a few minutes? What does it take most humans? Ten months or more? We are only superior beings if we live long enough for our cerebral cortexes to catch up and learn all the things it takes to be human. And no. There is no fucking soul, so get over yourself.

Wait. Correction. Looking at you, Ms. Harris, I know that at least you have no soul.

Stem cell research: “I’m the only candidate in the primary or general who’s voted against embryonic stem cell research and has voted for cord blood research and adult stem cell research. … There are no successes for embryonic. That is why the private sector is not involved and there is no justification for taking a live embryo and destroying it.”

Oh, you’re just a robot for Bush-Christ, aren’t you, lady? He must love having you down there. Too bad you’re gonna lose this race, and as Carrie’s mother would say: we’re all gonna laugh at you.

Oh, wait, he doesn’t like you down there at all, does he? Disloyal bastard! And after you subverted the U.S. Contitution and committed treason for him! What kind of friend is that?

Regarding the Florida primary: “Florida is the forerunner state. …[W]hat happens in Florida sets the trend for what happens nationally. And with this election, if Bill Nelson wins, it’s going to be a very frightening proposition in 2008 in the presidential elections because whoever wins Florida will win the presidency.”

The interview in full is available here.

Thanks, Kathie, for undermining everything we actually value about our democracy in a single interview.

I’m beginning to have more and more confidence that you fuckings fascists are on your way out the door en masse. America will rid itself of your poison and get back on track. And I’m gonna help do it, fuckers.

Again… for the slow ones:

CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW RESPECTING AN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION, OR PROHIBITING THE FREE EXERCISE THEREOF; OR ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH, OR OF THE PRESS; OR THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE, AND TO PETITION THE GOVERNMENT FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES.

And who says life begins at conception? Where is your proof of this? How do you define it? Just because your parents have three children and they only fucked three times doesn’t prove anything.

How to be a dick:

The Tight Like Unto a Dish lunatic is back. This one is longer, and not as clever as the last, but anything that makes fun of Mormons is okay in my book!

Thanks to Ray for sending this in.

OK, everybody, this one’s long, but there was stuff I just didn’t want to cut out!

The Story Thus Far: In 1095 – 1096, three major unexpectedly massive movements answered Pope Urban II’s call to the First Crusade: the People’s/Peasants’/Paupers’, German, and Princes’/Barons’ Crusades (the graphic depicts four major figures of this army from left to right: Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemund of Taranto, and Tancred Bohemund’s nephew; see “Get the Hell Out of My Holy Land!” Part 1).

After Alex I had deployed fanatical monk Peter the Hermit’s mostly peasant People’s Crusade to Asia Minor, the Islamic Seljuq Turks picked it apart – not before the crusaders got them some looting and pillaging in first (people whispered that they had impaled babies on their lances in some towns). At Civetot, only about 3,000 Christians survived by holing up in an abandoned castle; the Seljuqs slaughtered men, women, and children except for those “young boys and girls whose appearance pleased” them. Draw your own conclusions as to their fates…

The Hermit himself had already scooted back to Constantinople, where he joined the official crusader army, the Princes’ Crusade; always one to land on his feet, he got put in charge of the troops that consisted mostly of commoners.

The German Crusade led by Emich, Volkmar, and Gottschalk massacred most of the Jews they encountered in their path; even the Church proved unable to stop them. In Worms, the crusaders broke into the bishop’s home and butchered close to 500 Jewish townspeople to whom he had given refuge. At Mainz, they killed all the Jews (approximately 1,000) who refused to convert despite having accepted gold in return for sparing them. Some Jewish citizens of Cologne drowned themselves in the river at the Crusade’s approach rather than face forced conversion or slaughter.

Rabbi Kalonymos and 50 Jews managed to flee Mainz for nearby Rudesheim, where they showed up at the archbishop’s door begging for sanctuary. Seeing an opportunity, the Church leader tried to convert them to Christianity, which proved more than Kalonymos could take; he attacked the clergyman with a knife. Ultimately, he and his people fell prey to the crusaders despite all their attempts to save themselves.

This Crusade fortunately split up shortly after entering Hungary. Runciman says in true British form, “The Hungarians would not permit such behavior (page 140);” they trounced the crusaders badly enough to break them up for good.

As for the Princes’ Crusade: after much political infighting, actual battling, marching through the harsh Asian summer, and suffering from disease, dehydration, and starvation, it had reached Muslim-held Antioch, traditionally considered the first “Christian” city, in October of 1097. After a long, grueling siege, the crusaders finally entered Antioch and massacred most of the inhabitants including some Christians, notwithstanding the fact that many of them had helped kill the Islamic garrison – only to discover their siege had left the city almost bereft of provisions.

Ambitious Bohemund harbored specific plans to turn Antioch into the capital of his own crusader kingdom – and to give the guy credit, he had engineered their victory through bribery. Of the other barons, Raymond (the leader even Unitary Moonbat of DailyKoS admits most qualifies as the “good guy” in the story; the lack of emphasis on his figure in the graphic shows how retellings of the Crusade tended to diminish his importance, but as I mentioned in Part 1, he was far more significant than depicted) had definitely cottoned on to his intentions, but a far more dangerous development now threatened their tenuous position: the approach of the huge army of the dread Turk Kerbogha, Atabeg of Mosul.

They had surmounted many obstacles to get this close to the Holy Land, beginning with their leaders’ compelled pledge of allegiance to Alex I, which Ray had gotten out of by instead forging an alliance with the Byzantine ruler against their mutual rival Bohemund. However, at the “Battle” of Nicaea, the Emperor had made it clear he had his own priorities over the crusade, leaving them pretty much on their own on the road to Jerusalem. Despite the willingness of some villages to provision them, the men often looted and pillaged anyway, and one of the Princes, Baldwin of Boulogne, struck out on his own to end up establishing the first crusader kingdom in Armenian Edessa.

Low morale now led to desertion. The same Peter the Hermit who led the People’s Crusade into disaster and joined the princes in Constantinople now got caught trying to run away. Because of his popularity with the troops, the barons kept his attempted escape under wraps, but it damaged his standing with them. Even one of their own number, Stephen of Blois, took to the road out of the city with most of his troops; encountering Alex I on the way back to Europe, and assuming the Turks had killed off the crusaders, he was instrumental in the Byzantine Emperor’s turning back instead of continuing on to assist at Antioch – a “betrayal” for which the barons never forgave Alex.

Steve probably shouldn’t have bothered leaving; instead of greeting him with open arms, his wife Adela of Normandy nagged him into going right back out on the very next Crusade of 1101. Why he expected anything different I don’t know; she had nagged him into going on the first one as well. Imho, as daughter of William the Conqueror of England, she probably would have made a much better crusader than he did; most historians agree that she seemed to have worn the pants in that marriage.

Suddenly a peasant monk who had been having visions, Peter Bartholomew, burst on the scene brandishing a dirty piece of metal he claimed was a spear point. He had found the Holy Lance that had pierced Jesus’ side as He hung on the cross, just as he had dreamed it. This was the sign that they would succeed against Kerbogha!

The papal legate Adhemar of Le Puy and several other Princes (like Bohemund) greeted his announcement with skepticism. The men had been digging in vain for the sacred spear since Bart first let everyone know about his “vision,” so his finding it so easily by himself seemed, well, frankly too convenient.

On the other hand Ray, a veteran of the Spanish Reconquista and by all accounts a pretty religious guy himself (hey, the pope’s representative was part of his entourage), believed the guy’s story and most importantly, so did the regular men-at-arms. Even the skeptics in the group now recognized the alleged Lance’s value as a rallying point for their flagging forces. Despite their hunger, they even went for Bart’s “revelation” that victory would be theirs if they fasted for five days before riding out to meet their foe.

On June 28, 1098 CE, in a frenzied battle outside the city walls, the crusaders defeated Kerbogha, whose army had not quite coincidentally disorganized and fractured due to political infighting (it has been suggested that Bart may have known about this and timed his visions accordingly; at any rate, his ultimate fate dying from burns inflicted by a walk through fire to prove he had True Visions (TM) was not an enviable one!).

From his sickbed (he fell very ill about this time), Ray commanded the 200 men guarding the fortress/citadel on the hill overlooking Antioch, still held until that moment in time by Kerbogha crony Ahmed Ibn Merwan, who later personally and very suspiciously “surrendered” the fortress to Bohemund instead of Ray.

Bohemund eventually got what he wanted and became first Prince of Antioch. He had already conveniently found a good excuse to invalidate his pledge of allegiance to the Byzantines.

And at the start of 1099, Ray and the others got back to business – and headed for Jerusalem.

Next: “Get the Hell Out of My Holy Land!” Part 3

Sources: A History of the Crusades – Volume 1: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Steven Runciman, 1964 Harper & Row, New York, NY.