Comments

  1. says

    I can just hear all the christians rave about how anyone who does that kind of thing is not a true christian and how asking for that promotion was totally different.

  3. says

    It’s only just a parody. I remember about 10 years ago seeing some televangelist tell viewers they should send in money because people who don’t sufficiently demonstrate their devotion to the Almighty will suffer intolerably. His example? Haiti. That’s right, all of Haiti’s misfortunes are because they don’t pray enough (and send that televangelist money, presumably).

    Here’s what I don’t get about prayer: The omniscient, omnicognic, benevolent and omnipotent creator has a plan for the universe but then you come along and, just by mumbling some demonstrably mistranscribed, mistranslated and misinterpreted words, are able to change his mind because something about the plan doesn’t suit you. I mean, really?

  4. says

    That’s simple: prayer is a magic spell meant to change the universe and suspend the laws of nature and probability.

    BTW, has anyone heard any news about Dennis Markuze’s psychiatric examination? He was supposed to be back in court September 19th but I haven’t been able to find anything in the news about it.

  6. reasonisbeauty says

    I thought all the genuine christian website ads that popped up at the end added significantly to the strength of the parody, especially when I followed the prayer requests website link and it turned out to be a bankruptcy lawyers’ broke christian trolling site…”Bankruptcy is a Christian Right”.

  8. starstuff91 says

    The Supreme court has rejected the stay of execution for Troy Davis. They’re going to kill him in the next few minutes.

  11. starstuff91 says

    I’m beyond the point of being angry or ashamed or disgusted. I’m just sad. This is awful.

  18. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Jesus Christ. Not that anyone should be surprised – it was a certainty that the US Supreme Court would do nothing. We are fucking barbarians.

  19. starstuff91 says

    This is the 4th time Troy Davis has been about to be put to death. That is torture. It’s one of the most cruel and unusual punishments you could put someone through. Can you imagine going through this four times? Thinking you’re about to die, only to be saved at the last minute, over and over again.

  21. Dr. Audley Z. Darkheart OM, purveyor of candy and lies says

    I hate to say it, but I’m not surprised.

    I am frustrated and saddened and disgusted.

  22. I'mthegenie!Icandoanything! says

    While it seems that many good people inhabit positions of power, the USA has been effectively run by stupidity, greed, and hatred so deep I have found a use for the word “evil”.

    The USA is now an evil nation, incapable of not harming those unlucky enough to be at its mercy. The people who drove this are not simply going along to get along with this case but actually desire injustice, suffering, and death.

    May it somehow pass, but there is no way to reach the Teabaggers and wingnuts and Xians, and the powerful evildoers who manipulate or even create them. They must simply be opposed (as Victor told Rick in Casablanca) – until they themselves suffer, personally and without being able to blame their suffering on others, these are human beings in the worst sense only.

    May I live long enough to be proud to be an American again. The fact makes me want to spit at this time.

  24. quietpanther says

    @reasonisbeauty I followed the link to “Miracle Prayer Requests”, figuring that if thousands of people pray for an imaginary being to give me a million dollars, it just might increase my chances of winning some sweepstakes. Lo and behold, it costs $9-35 to post a prayer request….

  25. John Morales says

    I’mthegenie!Icandoanything!:

    May I live long enough to be proud to be an American again.

    To you and other Americans who’ve expressed a similar sentiment:
    this exhibits the conceit that you can be vicariously proud for that which you haven’t achieved.

    I have little time for those who entertain pride by proxy.

    (Not to say I don’t accept your sentiment for what it is, the which I think does you credit)

  26. Sally Strange, OM says

    @ John Morales

    Being “proud to be an American” would involve working, along with millions of other people, to transform our system of government into one that actually embodies, rather than contradicts, the allegedly “American” values of equality, freedom, and democracy.

    Whether this is possible or not, I am skeptical. I can’t speak for anyone else, but to me there’s nothing “proxy” about it. It’s my government, it purports to represent me, I voted for the representatives… I am involved, whether I want to be or not.

  27. starstuff91 says

    The victim’s family watched this man die (as usually happens with executions in this country). This is not justice. This is revenge. This is bloodlust.

  28. Sally Strange, OM says

    Fuck. You know, and it’s so distressing to hear Troy Davis’ letter, and his family, continually taking comfort in their Christian belief. “They can only destroy my physical body,” he said in his letter. But Troy Davis IS his physical body. They can’t destroy Davis’ memory, but the memory of a person is not the same as the person himself. And destroying Troy Davis’ body is the same thing as destroying the man himself. He is gone forever now. No angels in heaven will sing him to his rest. No god to welcome him into eternal bliss. C’est fini.

    If so many people were not convinced in this dualist idea that a soul or spirit persists after death, I believe it would be much harder for them to justify the State executing people.

  29. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Shut up, John. Few here hew to the idea that one can or should be proud of the place into which they were actually born. More of us would like to be proud that our country would live up to its best ideals, at least the ones it claims are its ideals.

  31. Mattir says

    John, I know you’re an irascible type, but really, “I’m proud of you” is like “I’m sorry” in that it has meanings that do not encompass the speaker’s assumption of complete personal responsibility for the event in question.

    Next time you have the flu, think of me saying “I’m sorry you’re sick.” I will not be accepting responsibility for giving you the flu virus from the other side of the planet.

    This is awful enough without bizarre linguistic arguments.

  32. Part-Time Insomniac, Zombie Porcupine Nox Arcana Fan says

    Remind me again, just how many people who wanted to see him die describe themselves as “pro-life”? There’s a disturbing relationship between the two. Maybe people will start putting pressure on the Supreme Court for being such a bunch of assheads?

    …………….who am I trying to fool? The madness will continue.

  33. starstuff91 says

    CNN was interviewing the reporters who were allowed to watch the execution. How can someone sit there and watch someone being killed? How can you just sit there and watch another human being die? The very idea makes me feel physically sick.

  34. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    If so many people were not convinced in this dualist idea that a soul or spirit persists after death, I believe it would be much harder for them to justify the State executing people.

    I wish I could agree, but I doubt it. People are depraved and full of blood lust. They don’t care. No one who’s cheering this man’s death is even thinking about his afterlife in more than a cursory way. They’d do it anyway. They want the most vicious thing to happen; they don’t give a shit about consequences or consolation, unless they can further arouse themselves with the thought of torment in hell.

  35. John Morales says

    Sally, I get what you’re saying, but such an attitude (if you are consistent) means you have to be proud, shamed or indifferent in relation to that which any grouping to which you belong does.

    As a life-form. As a human. As a woman. As an American. As a (resident of your State). As (resident of your city). As a feminist.
    Indeed, as a member of any organisation to which you belong.

    (All nations have purported national values of which their citizens are supposed to be proud of — in my case (Australia) the tradition of “a fair go”. You buy into that, well, I suppose that’s your prerogative)

  37. John Morales says

    Josh:

    Few here hew to the idea that one can or should be proud of the place into which they were actually born. More of us would like to be proud that our country would live up to its best ideals, at least the ones it claims are its ideals.

    In short: few here are proud by proxy, but you would like to be.

    (Go for it)

    —

    Mattir:

    John, I know you’re an irascible type, but really, “I’m proud of you” is like “I’m sorry” in that it has meanings that do not encompass the speaker’s assumption of complete personal responsibility for the event in question.

    Care to explicate what this meaning is, if not pride by proxy?

  38. John Morales says

    starstuff91,

    How can someone sit there and watch someone being killed?

    In many ways; not all involve pleasure.

    It’s a form of not turning away or ignoring reality.

    (I held my dog as he was given a lethal injection; I held my cat as it perished due to systemic failure.

    So I cried; yet I was not cowardly enough to distance myself from the process and I embraced the reality, painful as it was)

  39. starstuff91 says

    John, shut the fuck up. No one here wants to argue semantics with you right now. A man was just killed by our government despite every indication that his trial was completely unjust and despite a public outcry about it. We’re just trying to deal with this latest blow to our sensibilities. We’re just trying to figure out how we’re supposed to live happily in a country that does these horrible things.

  40. Mattir says

    John, how about “I admire and support your accomplishments?”

    I’m getting off the internet before I say something I’ll regret.

  42. John Morales says

    Mattir, don’t go away on my behalf, please.

    (I don’t want that power)

    —

    You can tell me honestly what you think, and I hereby undertake not to respond to what you tell me.

    Yes, I am giving you carte blanche.

  44. Mattir says

    John, it’s also midnight here, I’m fighting with myself not to go read the rah-rah-we-killed-him comments on Georgia newspaper sites, and I think I’ve said what I can about the multiple meanings of “I’m proud of you.” But thanks for the carte blanche. Can I have a rain check?

  45. John Morales says

    [toeing the line to my commitment]

    Mattir, yes, you can have a never-ending rain check.

    (Invoke it whenever you wish, you’ve more than earnt that much)

  46. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    In short: few here are proud by proxy, but you would like to be.

    (Go for it)

    What the fuck, John? That took deliberate and uncharitable misreading for you to come up with that. Piss off.

  47. Sally Strange, OM says

    As a life-form.

    I have no power to affect the collective actions of life-forms. This is not a voluntary grouping.

    As a human.

    Also not a voluntary grouping. I feel no particular pride or shame based on the collective actions of humanity. I also have little power to affect humanity’s collective actions.

    As a woman.

    Another involuntary grouping, but I do feel some small measure of pride about being a woman in a sexist society and not being driven mad by it.

    As an American.

    This grouping is somewhat involuntary. Theoretically I could emigrate, but it’s difficult. For the moment, I’m relatively stuck. Nevertheless, in the abstract at least, I have the power to influence the collective actions of America, through voting, activism, and by getting involved in government. I try to fulfill my responsibilities as a citizen. Therefore I feel some measure of responsibility for America’s collective actions. Sure, I didn’t vote for Bush and his wars, but I could have campaigned harder for the alternative. This is still, nominally at least, a democracy.

    As a (resident of your State).

    I am proud to have chosen to reside in Vermont, and voted for the governor and for my representatives, who are now working on projects for which I have campaigned, like a single payer health care plan. I feel very connected to my government representatives here and feel like my small voice has at least some influence.

    As (resident of your city).

    Ditto as for the state.

    As a feminist.

    I feel extremely proud to choose to call myself a feminist, despite not agreeing with everything every feminist ever said. This is an extremely voluntary grouping, one which marks me for social opprobrium in many situations, so I’m quite proud to be a feminist.

    Indeed, as a member of any organisation to which you belong.

    This undermines your own thesis, since “life-form” “human” and “woman” are not examples of organizations.

    You’re being silly. Stop it.

  48. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Well, one small good thing. I just turned out the four most gorgeous loaves of bread I’ve ever made. Tall, light, crusty cheddar-chive sourdough. Year-old cheddar from a local farm and chives from my herb garden. They’re attractively arranged on a bread board waiting for my neighbors who are kitteh sitting for me while I’m out of town for the next week and a half.

    Hail, hail, Phoenicia— a starter I did make up! (Don’t worry, Theo, she’ll be coming to a post office near you in a few weeks).

  49. kristinc says

    Oh Josh, you and Phoenicia make me wish I’d tasted a single sourdough bread I could ever stand to eat.

  51. says

    SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11eleventy-eleven!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  54. kristinc says

    I have a question for knitters and/or people who crochet. I have a hank of sock-weight handpainted yarn that I want to crochet into fingerless mitts, something I have done before, but only with worsted weight yarn. I don’t particularly want to make myself blind and crazy crocheting thin mitts with a small hook. The hank of yarn would be enough to make a pair of mitts as-is (it actually says it’s enough for a large pair of socks), so does that mean it would also be enough for a pair of mitts if I doubled it up and used a larger hook?

    I don’t particularly understand the intricacies of calculating yarn amounts when substituting one weight for another, doubling strands and so forth; it confuses me. Thanks in advance.

  55. Sally Strange, OM says

    Going to exercise my privilege and put Troy Davis out of my mind for the moment. Going to listen to Eddie Izzard and do some yoga.

    Night all.

  56. theophontes , flambeau du communisme says

    @ Josh

    (Don’t worry, Theo, she’ll be coming to a post office near you in a few weeks).

    *Genuflects*
    ALL HAIL PHOENICIA!
    {theophontes heads off to post box which has been gilded and strewn with flowers}: sq… sq…
    *checks censers are filled with blessed yaks fat and holy herbs*
    sq … sq …
    *lights the josh sticks*
    …sqeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!11111!!1111!!eleventyleven!111!!!

  57. says

    My major squee is not for Josh and Phoenicia, much as they may deserve it.

    *hint*
    My Bonnie’s from over the ocean.
    My Bonnie’s from over the sea.
    She’s now in a warehouse in Sydney.
    Oh please ship my Bonnie to me!

    Ship her, ship her, oh please ship my Bonnie to me, to me!
    Ship her, ship her, in time for my birthday party!

  61. theophontes, High Minion of Phoenicia says

    @ Alethea

    Ship her, ship her, oh please ship my Bonnie to me, to me!

    You too are receiving Phoenicia (PBUH)* into your life? Most excellent news.

    ……

    *Polysaccharides Be Upon Her

  62. lipwig says

    Wow, just fucking wow. They acually killed him. When there was doubt. In-fucking-credable.

    How does that work?

  64. says

    Good morning
    I’m glad I’m on the other side of the ocean.
    Reading up TET, reading about the hope that the execution would be stopped, reading on that they murdered him (I’m not going to use the neutral killed here. For me, this fullfills all three major criteria usually “checked” in Germany: planned, without a chance for the victim, out of low motives) was bad enough.
    I’m glad I didn’t have to witness it.
    What else can I say? Nothing that hasn’t been said before.

  65. theophontes , flambeau du communisme says

    @ Lipwig

    How does that work?

    I am still trying to digest all of this. It just screams a thousand kinds of wrong – on every level. It is almost overwhelming in how perversely justice has been twisted. This has been a terrible crime in itself and has solved nothing. Worse even, in that it is sponsored by the state and cheered on by a baying mob.

    My mind leaps to all kinds of explanations. Perhaps there is some dark place in the American soul that is crying out for a scapegoat like Troy Davis to take away all the fear and guilt and anger that is built up by the social distortions of an essentially repressive,goddist culture? Or that there is real authoritarian delight in making this happen. “Now you see how sincere our hate is!” He was the closest receptacle for them to vomit the bile of their minds into …. I better stop here, I am starting to rant.

  66. theophontes , flambeau du communisme says

    @ Alethea

    When I make it to Oz, I’ll smuggle some in for you in a bible… ;D

  69. lipwig says

    @theophontes
    rant away…

    Cox from AI:

    …the death penalty is too great a power to give to the government

    What he says.

  70. Therrin says

    Mitch Daniels interview on Daily Show (part 3 online), comment toward audience, “I was hoping they were not as boring as they look.” (I assume he meant “bored” in context, but he didn’t bother to correct.) Most of the interview was spent with him avoiding actually addressing questions. I wish Stewart would have said, “You know, you didn’t actually answer what I asked, care to try again?”

  71. says

    Alethea
    I need to calm down again after reading the fucking stupid shit LS the brainless has spouted before I can comment there somewhat coherently.

    pelamun
    The Pirates’ problem is pure, unchecked and internalized privilege to the point where they lash out whenever anybody dares to even mildly point it out to them.
    The problem isn’t so much that their ratio is: 14:1, the problem is that they don’t even think that this is indeed something that should bother them.
    Of course the other parties are trying to profit from it, it’s only natural for them to do so. If I were ever tempted to chose between the Greens and the Pirates, the gender issue would surely swing me in direction of the Greens. I can’t stand Claudia Roth much, but she has at least a background in feminism and so have many women her age in the SPD. Sadly, this really seems to be a problem of generations: women who were already adults in the 70’s and 80’s fought important fights, like the fight to legalize abortion. The younger genertion often falls into the “oh, but we have that, we have women’s shelters, no more problems”
    The Pirate Party woman in the interview is a prime example of the privilege problem that has infected women as well:
    She has “solved” the problem for herself. She only has friends who are not rapists. She thought it was unfair that she should have to take care at night and decided not to bother. Fortunately, nothing has happened to her. So she thinks that’s the way. She probably doesn’t bother if her oh so good friends tell rape jokes because they would never rape a woman. She doesn’t realize that real rapists hide behind those “jokes”.
    She claims that “Mein Umfeld wertet meine Worte nicht nach der Frage ob sie von einer Frau oder einem Mann kommen.. Sie kommen von einer Person, die sie je nach Sinnhaftigkeit meiner Aussagen mehr oder weniger ernst nehmen.” (My environment doesn’t judge my words according to whether they’re uttered by a man or a woman. They are uttered by a person and are judged according to whether they make sense or not).
    If that’s the case I’d like her to explain why whenever within the Pirates a woman and a man run for a position, the man is elected.
    Are all the women coincidentially not qualified?
    Somehw she reminds me of Abby Smith a lot.

  73. pelamun says

    Giliell, as I said, I wasn’t privy to their internal discussions, and when I saw that ratio I was concerned. Now the plot thickens as it were, and if that really is their attitude, then I fully agree, such a party won’t have a place in the German political system. But parties can change too, and I hope they will see it. I’ve been skeptical of the party for a lot of other reasons as well, but this would definitely be a deal breaker for me as well..

  75. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Looks like a zombie day. Woke up at 2 am, and couldn’t get back to sleep…

  76. Tigger_the_Wing says

    Alethea,

    Getting excited about your birthday?! Bonnie means only one thing to me. =^_^=

    I’m certainly looking forward to the party!

    BTW I left a message for you on Facebook.

    Good news; my breast surgeon phoned my mobile this afternoon (I was out on a rare shopping trip) as soon as she got the results from the pathologist – the lump is totally benign/harmless/fatty tissue. =^_^=

  77. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    the lump is totally benign/harmless/fatty tissue.

    *applause, confetti, sound of champagne bottles opening*

  78. says

    Tigger

    Good news; my breast surgeon phoned my mobile this afternoon (I was out on a rare shopping trip) as soon as she got the results from the pathologist – the lump is totally benign/harmless/fatty tissue.

    Three cheers for harmless fatty tissue!

    Hmm, do some people actually think that I’m going to pay the 70€ just for coming here to look at my washing machine so they can tell me then that repairing it will cost me a further X€?
    That’s the sickness of capitalist production: Repairing things that are totally not waste is more expensive than buying a new one.

  79. Antiochus Epiphanes says

    While I am glad that the Troy Davis case has the attention of the world (for the next few hours, anyway), less than two miles from my home, we* kill someone every three weeks on average. Here the line-up of executions in the foreseeable future. Next up: Frank Garcia, undoubtedly guilty of murdering his wife and a police officer. In Texas it is sometimes an eye for an eye, rather than an eye for an alleged eye.

    *Yeah. We. My government. The one that represents my interests.

  81. Bernard Bumner says

    Here the line-up of executions in the foreseeable future.

    I don’t understand, why are only three out of the next five Hispanic?

  82. First Approximation says

    BWAHAHAHA….

    Santorum asks Google to clean up search results for his name

    On Tuesday, the socially conservative politician lashed out at Google, saying the company could get rid of the sexual references to his name on the search results if it wanted to — and perhaps would do so if he were a Democrat.
    “I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” he told Politico. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”
    He continued: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle, but I suspect that’s not true.”
    Santorum contacted Google and asked the company about the issue, Politico said.

    Ego-surfing is probably not so fun for Santorum. However, when he’s not Googling his own name he should search Streisand effect. (Yes, the internet sometimes isn’t fun for liberals like Streisand either.)

  83. says

    Antiochus Epiphanes
    Sadly, cases like Troy Davies are the ones that might finally win the debate. There’s a lot more people who would probably join the fight because there’s always the possibility to murder an innocent man (and it’s quite literally man here) than there are people who oppose the death penalty on principle of it being a fucking stupid crime itself.

    Well, now I’ll “leap over my own shadow”, meaning I’ll do it in spite of not really being keen on it and will take the daughter to a first ballet class.
    Maybe she doesn’t like it*
    *you can always dream

  87. onion girl, OM (Social Worker, tips appreciated) says

    Reposting after portcullis:

    RHINEBECK: Dear Rhinebeck attendees, if you haven’t signed up for the Google Group, please do so; all current details are there! If you haven’t received an invitation, email me at oniongirlsays at google mail dot com.

  88. Antiochus Epiphanes says

    Gilliel: We can hope, right?

    Not much of a ballet fan myself, but is there a special reason you hope your daughter won’t like it? Isn’t it just dancing?

  93. says

    Santorum asks Google to clean up search results for his name…

    … man, poor guy. Just checked, and yeah, some pretty ugly shit comes up when you Google that name.

    Fucking profane, ah tells ya what. Seriously… Stuff like:

    –that he opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest…

    –that he thinks abortion providers should be criminally charged…

    –some crazy shit about ‘man on dog’… Looks like some sick fuck is trying to frame this poor guy for trying to draw an equivalence between homosexuality and bestiality …

    –some nuttiness about his trying to get intelligent design taught under No Child Left Behind…

    –aaaand some bizarre allegation that he tried to blame child rape by priests on ‘liberal’ support for ‘alternative lifestyles’

    … so, hey, I can totally see how he might be a mite upset. It’s pretty disgusting, awright. Poor guy. That’s gotta be a painful thing, now, carrying a name around like that. Imagine the legacy. Does he have kids? Poor things… To be forever associated with such a toxic mix of ugly… C’mon Google, can’t you clean this mess up, like the poor bastard asks?

    (/… on the bright side, tho’, apparently ‘Santorum’ is also now a neologism referring to a mix of fecal matter, lube, and semen, occurring as a byproduct of anal sex. So, y’know, I guess he’s got some hope of being remembered with some affection, all the same…)

  97. First Approximation says

    AJ Milne #93

    +1
    _ _ _

    Apparently 20% of people in the US believe that god controls the economy.

    Of course. That’s why to fix the economy you have pray before a golden bull on Wall Street. God likes that sorta thing, right?

    Anyway, from the article:

    Froese, a sociology professor at Baylor, said conservatives “have so conjoined their religious faith with economic conservatism that economic conservatism has become a matter of faith. It is very hard to sway those people with a counter argument.”

    So true.

  99. Rev. BigDumbChimp says

    What do you do when confronted by a group of clowns?

    Go for the juggler

    *rim shot

    *mic drop

    and I bid you good day.

    *bow

  101. cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniac says

    Good news; my breast surgeon phoned my mobile this afternoon (I was out on a rare shopping trip) as soon as she got the results from the pathologist – the lump is totally benign/harmless/fatty tissue. =^_^=

    Good news, indeed!
    :) :) :)
    –

  102. says

    Somehow, Trilobite eyes disprove evolution. Who knew?

    Well, that’s it people. I’m off to church.

    OT and FYI: our engagement ring is a trilobite fossil. Our wedding isn’t going to be traditional, obviously.

  103. says

    our engagement ring is a trilobite fossil

    I hope I’m not intruding to much on your personal life by asking this, but I’d really like to see pictures of that!

  104. Dhorvath, OM says

    Tigger,
    So happy to hear that. Celebration has commenced.
    ___

    AJ Milne,
    Re: Santorum,
    Well played. Well played indeed.

  107. theophontes, feu d'artifice du cosmopolitisme says

    @ [meta]

    Rhino Pharyngulation: If you are currently mulling over new sites worth pharyngulating, consider this one by the Wilderness Foundation. (Warning: Some of the footage linked to on this site is very upsetting.) Petitions do still make a difference in South Africa, so do not feel you are wasting your time.

    Direct link to petition: Linky.

  110. Rev. BigDumbChimp says

    Strange I’ve posted a couple things today here, sans links and they haven’t shown up.

  111. Richard Austin says

    Rev. BDC: There’s been a severe dearth of posts since 4:47 server time; I assume you’re not the only one having issues.

  112. says

    Good evening

    SQB
    Kind of. But you’re right, that’s memories indeed

    Antiochus Epiphanes
    Well, I dislike the world of pink. It’s horrible to see how the kids are pinkified and to me, ballet is like the ultimate haven of pinkyness.
    But it’s not my decission to make. I told the kid she could do some sport or other and she wanted to go dancing. So ballet it is. Of course she liked it, but apart from too many pink tutus, I was rather pleasantly surprised. The teacher basically told me to sit down and shut up and not to urge the kid forward if she didn’t want to. She seemed to enjoy it and, well, it might actually be the best sport for her little foot-problem anyway*

    *She lacks strength and control in her feet, especially in the right one. We checked that it isn’t a problem with the feet themselves, but it’s wise to get her to train the muscles.

  113. Rawnaeris says

    Update: We will be moving into a new unit in the near future. Our apartment manager has been very helpful and understanding.
    The police are actively tracking down leads.
    The insurance company is going to cover everything we lost.

    So we are working our way towards having peace of mind again.

    Everyone, thanks for your support and sympathy.

  115. cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniac says

    Well, I dislike the world of pink. It’s horrible to see how the kids are pinkified and to me, ballet is like the ultimate haven of pinkyness.

    Back in the Old Days when multicellular organisms were the Hot New Thing, I did ballet. I share (have always shared, and am confident that I will continue to share) your dislike for pinkness. Lucky for me, The Pinkness happened to other girls. I got to do my ballet in peacock blue.
    :)
    –

  117. Invisible Dragon says

    kristinc@54

    I knit and crochet and I hate the tiny needles/hooks; incipient arthritis. I’ve been doubling – even tripling or more – my yarns for years. If your one hank is enough for a pair of anything, there shouldn’t be any reason why you couldn’t pair it with another thin yarn and use your preferred hook size. All that really matters is that you hit the stated gauge.

    As for doubling *this* single hank, that depends on your pattern and the available yardage. I’ve done it with mitts, but I was sweating on the second one. If doubling it would leave the yardage equivilent of your worsted, you should be good. But, you know, swatch first.

  118. SteveV says

    This is a Bonnie
    Although, judging by the the road surface, there can’t be any oil in the tank.
    Now I’m going all nostalgic for my Triton
    Have a good birthday Alethea!
    Great news, Tigger!

  119. opposablethumbs, que le pouce enragé mette les pouces says

    Gilliel, do you suppose she might also enjoy having a go at other genres of dance (if they’re available for kids in your area, obviously)? Like, contemporary ballet as well as trad? I’m not even remotely genned up on dance, but I’ve always liked the kind of way modern dance uses the body more than classical ballet.

    Also, yay for Cicely’s peacock blue! :)

  120. says

    cicely
    I’m trying to smuggle some purple/black combinations into her bag, but unfortunately she’s already fallen for society’s pressure.
    And you can really see that this is her trying to meet expectations.
    On our holiday, her favourite colour was blue.
    When I had my night out at the medieval fair last Friday, I brought them some bracelets (wonderfull sparkling glass beads, got one myself). Knowing that she fancies pink at the moment, I chose one for her in different shades of pink while I got her sister one in smaragd-green. When I gave them to them and we were amongst ourselves, the first thing she did was to swap the pink one for the green one.
    But this morning, not even purple was “girly enough” :(

    Hmm, I’m fighting with myself: Should I watch the news? 8 out of 15 minutes will be dedicated to the pope and 2 to the weather…

  121. Brother Ogvorbis, Hominy Lovin' Hominid! says

    Giliell:

    I managed to miss that whole stage. Girl resisted even the idea of dance classes. And spent much of her youth as a tomboy. She did have about a two-week pink phase at around age 11, but that was it. Now, at 18, she is a big fan of Hello, Kitty pink stuff.

    When Girl was younger, I dreaded going to a toy store and taking her into the [scary organ music] DREADED PINK AISLE. I was willing to do it, but those aisles in the toy store gave me the willies. Still do, actually.

  122. The Lone Coyote says

    I was very interested in the discussion from the previous TET about natural vs adopted kids.

    I’ve talked about my own situation with my ex and her kid to death now, so obviously this topic interests me personally. I of course can’t really call myself an ‘adoptive father’, since I’m not actually living with her and taking care of the baby 24-7, but it’s pretty close.

    What’s funny is that before it happened, I swore up and down I’d never be cuckolded, tricked into raising someone else’s spawn (this is old mean misogynist me speaking), that I’d only be interested in my own genetic spawn, much like the noble lion. Yeah. Just like that.

    And yet, once it actually ‘happened to me’, my thinking was suddenly the opposite of what I swore it was. Partially it’s because it dawned on me that, while not ‘half me’, she’s still half the woman I love. The baby, as I’ve said, played her own part in the whole process, and I suspect it was just as instinctive for her (baby) as it was for me.

    Once the ex came to terms that she’ll never be able to force herself to be a happy hetero member of a traditional family unit, she broke up with me. I was depressed about losing her, but that had happened before (we have a long, untraditional, sometimes painful, but ultimately worthwhile relationship), but I was just as depressed at the prospect of the severing of this bond that was beginning to develop between baby and me. I think the ex was depressed about that too, because we worked it out. Now I dunno if we’re ‘together’ in some sense, or just really good friends, or what, but I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

    Traditional values have treated both of us like shit most of our lives, so why in FUCK should we feel the need to live up to them? To hell with them, I say! We are social primates, and we can do whatever the fuck we want with our lifestyles if it works for us and doesn’t hurt or exploit anyone.

    Hell, most social primates do whatever the fuck they want even when it does hurt and exploit someone.

    Went off on a tangent there. I suppose I have no great insight to offer, I just wanted to share my experience and thoughts.

    I do think adoption is ‘the loving option’ (WRT to all the children needing good parents out there) and it would be more responsible if people would adopt rather than try really hard to conceive, but let’s face it people, we’re animals. Animals kind of have a bit of an interest in passing on their genetic materials… it may be the only universal constant in life.

    OTOH, humans are somewhat unique: Not only is passing on our genetic material important, I believe passing on our accumulated knowledge and experience is just as, if not more, important to our ‘humanity’ than genes. But this is just a personal belief, I’m sure others may think differently. But to me, one of the joys of this weird form of semi ‘parenthood’ is being able to teach things to the child- I helped her learn to walk. That was a joy.

  123. says

    *gnarf*
    I’m sorry about the all-bold again
    :(

    opposablethumbs
    The only other danceform avaible for 4 y-o here is carnival Gardetanz. That looks actually worse, especially if you consider that the teachers are mostly dedicated amateurs without any qualification in pedagogy, physiology or anything else and the culture surrounding this is even wirse than ballet. Those girls are the meat to look at between the “clever and funny” speeches of the men.
    Here at least she’s got a qualified teacher (Walton would love him, he graduated from the Royal Academy of Dance). When she’s older she can choose from different dance styles like jazz-dance or also free dance. Maybe she’ll also lose interest in a few months. We’ll see.

  124. The Lone Coyote says

    Yeesh Gilliel, I assume short-shorts under the skirts aren’t part of the dance uniform?

    I don’t dance, have no real experience or appreciation for dance, and am pretty much unqualified to comment on dancing as an artform, period, but alot of those dance programs for young girls make me just a teeny bit leery of possible sexualization.

  125. cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniac says

    Giliell, how does she feel about lavender/lilac? Could be worth finding out….
    –

    When Girl was younger, I dreaded going to a toy store and taking her into the [scary organ music] DREADED PINK AISLE.

    I don’t blame you! Apart from the eyesoreness, there are…ponies.
    *shudder*
    –

    Now I dunno if we’re ‘together’ in some sense, or just really good friends, or what, but I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

    Friends with benefits, if not the ones that phrase usually suggests?
    –

  126. Ibis3, féministe avec un titre française de fantaisie says

    Hi folks. I’m dropping in to ask for some help from some mathy-physics type person. It’s been a couple of decades since I took either physics or math in school and though I did relatively okay, I’ve not retained a lot. My nephew is doing an online grade 12 physics course and I think I’ll be able to assist him, *if* I can get some help of my own as I go though it ahead of him as a refresher. I mean, I forget how to use my calculator to do trig functions! Anyway, if someone out there is willing to be my go-to person for questions both mind-numbingly simple and perhaps a little more complex, I’d really appreciate it.

    My e-mail is mdn0333 at gmail.

  127. opposablethumbs, que le pouce enragé mette les pouces says

    If that’s the alternative, it sounds like what she’s doing is infinitely better! Also those choices for when she’s a bit older sound interesting.

    Daughterspawn will be gone in two more days – off to uni this weekend, the first time away from home – and we were talking about her joining the university sports centre so she can find some fun exercise activity to do; she’s aiming to have a go at all the dance on offer (to start with), to see if she finds one she likes. I reckon as long as she finds something she enjoys enough to get her going along regularly so it helps keep her healthy, it doesn’t really matter what it is – her cardiovascular system won’t care if the music’s brilliant or rubbish, and I don’t have to listen to it … \annoying parent :)

  128. Sili says

    Hovering around $1000. Ack!!

    Likely gonna buy tomorrow, depending on what pops up on the google thread thingie.

  129. says

    cicely

    Giliell, how does she feel about lavender/lilac? Could be worth finding out….

    Well, this morning this shirt wasn’t girly enough *sigh*
    The other problem I have with pink, especially the light variety is that it really doesn’t work as hand-down. The little one looks aweful in pink.

    opposablethumbs
    Well, nothing against dance as such. I quite like some varieties of dance and I’m not so arrogant to deny the value of other people’s fun.
    Good luck for your daughter

    Brother Ogvorbis
    Don’t remind me of that. I try to steer clear of that as quickly as possible and move towards the Lego/Playmobil aisle.

    TLC
    Hey, if it works out for the three of you, that’s wonderful. Children can never have too many people who love them.
    Oh, yes, the shorts are part of the dress

  132. triskelethecat says

    *Raises glass to Tigger-the-Wing* I’ll drink to your wonderful news, Tigger! So happy to hear it was totally benign. Went through the same thing years ago when an area of fat necrosis was found on a breast. Horrible, scary time, even to find out everything is OK.

  133. says

    starstuff

    @ Giliell
    That is the most badass pony ever! Why is it a skeleton pony?

    Well, there’s this funny lady who likes a bit of dark-Tim-Burton-Coraline-general-Neil-Gayman-romaticky-style-stuff and she insists on passing this on to her, eh, the kids ;o)
    Short version: It’s a skeleton because I like it.

    Oh, and I guessed the amount of pope on the news correct within 7 seconds. But the bishop of Berlin was worth watching. He explained that only 1/3 of the inhabitants of Berlin are christians and he almost cried.

    Good night, everybody

  134. says

    Fuck!, colleagues, this ISN’T ROCKET SCIENCE! I gave you the XY coordinates of the original curve, I gave you the XY coordinates of the 2nd curve. I gave you the X shift and the Y shift to the 2nd curve.

    I even did the subtraction between the two. Why can’t you see that the DIFFERENCE between the two is the difference between the two!? Add the difference between them to the second curve, you plot the original curve.

    SRSLY, WTF!? (Fucking PhDs, how do they (get) work?)

    Tomorrow, I have to make graphic plots of this to prove it. It’s easy for me to do, but it’s so frustrating that a goddamn simple concept that even I get apparently isn’t grasped by doctors.[/rant mode off]

    Why, no, I didn’t have a good day at work. Why do you ask?

  135. Therrin says

    starstuff91

    Doctor Who Christmas special information is here :D

    Huh, I guess Matt Smith gets another year after all. He better not end up with more Doc-time than David Tennant. *grumble*

  136. Richard Austin says

    The Sailor:

    Grab a bottle of your favorite drink, a box of comfort cookies, and change your voicemail to this:

    We’re sorry, the number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.

  138. says

    Morning! Steve V, my Bonnie looks more this one – no kickstart on the modern ones. Also I am assured, very few mechanical problems, and they don’t spew oil everywhere. It’s retro style but new tech.

    Ballet’s not bad in some respects – it makes you strong, flexible and good at body awareness and isolating muscle movements. My occasional bellydance teacher started in ballet, and now she’s a very happy plus-sized gothic tribal dancer. The main problems seem to be for the teenaged dancers – a scarily high rate of anorexia, and fucked up feet from too much pointe.

  139. says

    Sorry folks, I have caught up with the thread and I have no excuse for making my last comment all about me, me, ME.
    +++++++++++++++
    Benign = champagne for everyone on my tab!

    Girly stuff is what (in my limited experience) some girls go thru and sometimes stay there. You gave her choices, this is what she chooses, currently. (I should have made that more gender neutral, but my main experience is with my niece. She had her choice of toolboxes, electronics and Barbie, and she liked ballet, pink, and Barbie. Until she went Goth for a year or 2. She couldn’t seem to make the frown and ennui stick. Now she seems to be a fine adult.)

    My Bonnie was my Dad’s nickname for me and sang that song to me so many times when I was growing up. It was derived from Bonson, which I’m told was derived from my inability to pronounce my own name when I was a toddler.

    Hey, what do you call a Triumph Bonneville w/o an oil leak?
    Out of oil.

    Yeah, I used to own a 650.

  140. opposablethumbs, que le pouce enragé mette les pouces says

    Thank you, Gilliel! (Actually I’m feeling pretty … happy and devastated all at once about her going – it’s wonderful for her to go off to uni, but I’m going to miss her company so much!)

  141. kristinc says

    The Sailor @134: I … I have dyscalculia and I am pretty sure I can grasp that. What’s not to grasp?

  142. says

    Thanks Richard, I can use that to befuddle my colleague. The other advice I’m already taking.

    And I feel much better now. [/Night Court- John Astin]

  143. Part-Time Insomniac, Zombie Porcupine Nox Arcana Fan says

    Yay for benign lump, Tigger!

    Hugs to opposablethumbs. Just stay in touch with your daughter and maybe it will help with the “missing her company” part.

    Yay for dance, but a big fat Boo to some of the options available. I suppose next someone will market pole dancing for toddlers? My only real experience with dance was ballroom dancing, but I enjoyed it very much.

    The girliest I got was the usual Barbie and My Little Pony. Lace and I don’t get along. Pink is likely my least favorite color, especially that garish Barbie pink.

    I still can’t believe Troy Davis is dead. Did they just want to finally get their little jollies by watching a scapegoat die? I’m wondering which, in his eyes, was worse: long years of being on edge, or at last knowing he was going to die.

  144. kristinc says

    It was purple for me. My room was painted very pale lilac and I had matching purple-with-unicorns bedding and curtains. I could not get enough purple and horselike creatures.

    Theoretically it may be a “choice” for little girls to consume pink, but it’s not an unweighted choice. From infancy I dressed my daughter in and surrounded her with all kinds of bright colors and she loved them all — blue, purple, green, orange, the brighter the better. But shortly after starting kindergarten, she began mainlining pink and rejecting things in colors she used to love. Suddenly pink and purple were just about the only acceptable colors. She was clearly being taught by the other children what she was supposed to like, something I had successfully guarded against for 5 years.

  145. says

    kristinc, I know, right?

    Now I have a personal problem: I was not diplomatic today. I have one of those faces that displays what I’m thinking/feeling, and my behavior was in line with what I was thinking. I didn’t go off on anyone, but other people tend to perceive me being frustrated as me being angry.

    It doesn’t help that it was at the end of my work day and I tend to get low-blood sugar and it makes me cranky.

  149. says

    Where is Lawrence Krauss!

    I need him to tell me how (or if) these ‘faster than speed of light’ particles are going to change the standard model of physics (if at all).

  150. Tigger_the_Wing says

    Thank you everybody for the conga rats and the tipple of your choice is on me, coming through a USB near you!

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    SteveV,

    perhaps the baking tray that is normally kept under that Bonnie was whipped away briefly for the photo? That’s what my brother did when he wanted to sell his 3TA. =-_^=

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Alethea,

    just the right kind of Bonnie (like the one I had – no leaks!). Don’t worry about FB; I’m not interested much in sharing that which is personal on there, and even less in that which is personal to other people.

    Oh, and can belly dance be done sitting down part of the time?

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Pink – what can I say? I really wasn’t into it until I hit 51, and suddenly it seemed hilariously funny to go pink in everything; pink toolbox, pink clothes, pink kitchen utensils, pink hair etc. simply because middle-aged women aren’t supposed to. Especially unfeminine* ones like me. I was always into blues, greys and blacks; now my wardrobe also has quite a lot of pink, red and orange.

    (*My laptop’s dictionary denies that’s a word. WTF?)

    My daughter had almost nothing pink as a baby because most of her clothes were hand-me-downs from her big brothers (17/34 months older than her). She wore pink to ballet classes (her brothers wore black tights with singlets that had broad horizontal red-and -white or blue-and-white stripes). I thought the lessons did a great deal for their balance, co-ordination and concentration (especially with regards to following instructions). Her last pink dress was a bridesmaid’s one when she was six; since then, she has avoided pink like the plague. All my three older kids had My Little Ponies and enjoyed playing war games with them and their Thundercats.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    The Sailor,

    Why not make a post that is all about you? I think that this is a perfect, and safe, place for venting, and your frustration with your colleagues was definitely warranted! It seems to me that lots of people perceive frustration as anger; perhaps because they are more used to frustration being directed at an object or at oneself than at (the incomprehension of) others?

  151. Therrin says

    I like Matt Smith better than David Tennant.

    Pffft. David Tennant took a little while to come into the role, but he was so much more expressive. When he got mad, he got mad. Also, Matt Smith hasn’t had any companion changes, which are prime opportunities to show off. They are both enjoyable for different reasons, and maybe when Matt Smith’s time is up, I’ll have changed my mind.

  152. Richard Austin says

    evader:

    We can only hope*. But since it’s not a new particle (yet), I don’t think that’s in trouble. The Standard Model has more to fear from not finding the Higgs.

    *The mathematician in me severely dislikes the Standard Model – it’s totally inelegant, and it’s getting worse all the time. I accept it as useful without enjoying it. Really, though, I’d just like some new physics paradigms to play with.

  153. starstuff91 says

    I think that the combination of Tennant acting and RTD writing was just too much. Tennant has the tendency to over act and RTD was just a little ridiculous with his plots sometimes (especially the whole “Doctor worship”). I did enjoy Tennant a lot, I just think the show took itself a little too seriously at time. Matt Smith makes me smile more. He’s dorky and silly but still does an amazing job at portraying someone who’s really ancient. When he gets mad, you can feel it even if he seems calm. I think Smith is more subtle about it.

  154. First Approximation says

    Where is Lawrence Krauss!

    I need him to tell me how (or if) these ‘faster than speed of light’ particles are going to change the standard model of physics (if at all).

    Well here’s astrophysicist Ethan Siegel:
    http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/this_extraordinary_claim_requi.php

    Also, theoretical physics (and professional asshole) Luboš Motl:

    http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/italian-out-of-tune-superluminal.html

    WARNING: The background to Motl’s blog is *really* ugly and his writing style is…um…. unique. However, his physics is solid.

    Basically, it’s likely that they’re underestimating the systematic error. This isn’t the first time someone has made claims about superluminal neutrinos. Definitely shouldn’t throw out the best theories we have just yet.

    Really, though, I’d just like some new physics paradigms to play with.

    How about string theory?

  157. says

    String theory? Just to check I knotted a piece of small stuff and proceeded to make a Jacob’s Latter from muscle memory.

    It’s not just a theory, it a good idea.

  160. Mr. Fire says

    *blinding blue flash*

    -AAAAAAAAARRRGH!

    HOLY SHIT! IT WORKS! I SENT THIS MESSAGE FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT!

  161. Richard Austin says

    First Approximation:

    How about string theory?

    I like the attempt; none of the predictions it makes are testable yet (at least last time I checked), but it’s an interesting concept. I actually read “Elegant Universe” before string theory hit the mainstream population.

    Also, a friend bought me a Calabi-Yau manifold laser-etched inside a block of glass, so that’s pretty.

  162. Brother Ogvorbis, Hominy Lovin' Hominid! says

    HOLY SHIT! IT WORKS! I SENT THIS MESSAGE FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT!

    Slow it down, dude. Some of us majored in history and I kinna read tha’ fast.

  163. sandiseattle says

    this being an open thread: Brother Ogvorbis @ 155 reminded me of this old chestnut (truthfully told to me by a girl {yes I mean girl, i was >ahem< younger when I first heard this})

    Don't let the cat see your tampon string.

    I always found that one amusing.

  164. Mr. Fire says

    Yeah, I don’t know what all the fuss is about these so-called ‘superluminal’ particles. It’s surely just an artifact or somesuch.

    I mean, look. I’ll even reproduce their experiment right now at my desktop.

    Okey-dokey. Just, er, plugging in their numbers here…

    LHC miniature work-up model: on…

    Computer processor stable at 1.21 GHz: check…

    *daughter toddles in*

    Oh, hey Sweetie, don’t cross those strea-

    Wait, what-

    YAAAAAAAAA-

    *blinding blue flash*

  165. aladegorrion says

    Ahh, ballet. I guess I had a somewhat different experience in the whole “pink” thing of it. I had a brief pink phase (can’t remember if it was connected to ballet- I actually seem to recall a pink robe… who knows). But I also didn’t get much peer pressure towards pink (and definitely no parental pressure) and then spent much of my childhood hating pink (still do). I did ballet for 5+ years and loved the exercise. I still miss the exercise, as I hate working out. Fun, muscle control, some aerobic stuff, and I did like the blue costumes. Definitely blue for me. :)

    My problems from a while back- MUCH BETTER!! YEAH!!

    Hugs to Rawnearis, glad the apartment people and police are being helpful. Sympathies to Ing on the life troubles.
    Hugs and chocolate to everybody else if you want ’em!

  166. sandiseattle says

    Okay outta here for a ‘family’ watching of x-factor.
    Any thots on the show people? I’ll get back at ya tomorrow (my time). TTFN

  167. First Approximation says

    I like the attempt; none of the predictions it makes are testable yet (at least last time I checked), but it’s an interesting concept. I actually read “Elegant Universe” before string theory hit the mainstream population.

    Also, a friend bought me a Calabi-Yau manifold laser-etched inside a block of glass, so that’s pretty.

    Brian Greene’s lectures on string theory and Calabi-Yau manifolds are available on arXiv. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

  168. Brother Ogvorbis, Hominy Lovin' Hominid! says

    Well, I’m heading off to bed, perchance not to dream. I wonder if DM will actually answer my question with a coherent answer?

  170. theophontes , flambeau du communisme says

    @ Dhorvath #108

    [Rhino Pharyngulation]

    Signed. One minor qualm, why is title a necessary part of doing so?

    Thanks Dhorvath. W.r.t the whole title requirement, I think that is more a South African thing. Probably a case of a small group insisting loudly that they are to be addressed by their titles in correspondence – while nobody else gives a duck’s fart. (Or is it an authoritarian/hierarchy thing?) I completely agree that it is totally irrelevant here.

    @ Mr Fire

    The answer to the question you are about to ask is: “No, but the stains are hard to clean.”

    (QUANTUM interwebz ftw!)

    @ sandiinseat

    Spelling Police: TTFN TTBFN {fixed}
    /pedant

  173. chigau (...---...) says

    On another topic:
    WHEAT IS EVIL!!!!11!
    Threadizens!
    Have you heard of this guy?
    http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/2011/07/who-is-dr-william-davis/
    Also, a quote from the Maclean’s magazine interview:

    New strains have been generated using what the wheat industry proudly insists are “traditional breeding techniques,” though they involve processes like gamma irradiation and toxins such as sodium azide. The poison control people will tell you that if someone accidentally ingests sodium azide, you shouldn’t try to resuscitate the person because you could die, too, giving CPR. This is a highly toxic chemical.

    Macleans link: http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/09/20/on-the-evils-of-wheat-why-it-is-so-addictive-and-how-shunning-it-will-make-you-skinny/#more-215040
    I don’t get it.
    Help?

  174. says

    Mmmmm, wheat *Homer drool*

    Planned format for tonight: pizza base. If I die of sodium azide poisoning then I’ll update you from the afterlife.

    Seriously, no, I hadn’t heard of this loon, but “avoid wheat” is one of the bog-standard naturopath quack pieces of advice for the rubes. It might even work for some people who have an undiagnosed gluten intolerance.

  175. kristinc says

    I have a couple friends who believe that humans are not equipped biologically to consume grains, that they are “bad” for us. And a couple more who are not celiac but think they’re “gluten intolerant” or some shit and through selective perception convince themselves that every time they consume wheat they get vaguely defined symptoms of allergy.

  176. theophontes , flambeau du communisme says

    @ Alethea

    TTBFN = TaTa Bye(s) For Now

    Google

    *googles*

    Ok, perhaps it is not canonical after all. :/

    PS: Your new bike looks amazing.

  177. theophontes , flambeau du communisme says

    @ chigau (…—…)

    What is it with these morse codes? Over at the diagnosis thread we have someone called ” ..–.. “. Which means “?” Linky.

    I posted this in response:

    @ ..- -.. #17
    She was only the telegrapher’s daughter, but she didit ’cause her daadaa didit …

    /crosspost

  178. says

    Good morning
    Yay for another visit to the destist

    kristinc

    From infancy I dressed my daughter in and surrounded her with all kinds of bright colors and she loved them all — blue, purple, green, orange, the brighter the better. But shortly after starting kindergarten, she began mainlining pink and rejecting things in colors she used to love. Suddenly pink and purple were just about the only acceptable colors. She was clearly being taught by the other children what she was supposed to like, something I had successfully guarded against for 5 years.

    This, a thousand times.
    If I thought that pink was really what she wanted, I would go for it. But it is really noticable how she drops the girly-girl attitude once she’s at home. She hardly ever picks up her dolls. The Barbie dolls were interesting for about 3 days. She loves Lego and Playmobil and I can’t say that she’s playing the “girl games” of princesses, castles, and stuff.

    The Sailor
    Hmmm, how about storing some cookies in your desk? I know it won’t make the stupid colleagues go away, but as somebody married to a person who gets all cranky when his blood-sugar goes down, I#ve come to value cookies a lot.

    wheat and milk
    My ancestors surely suffered a lot to make sure I have the genes that allow me to deal with it. Milk and cookies!

  179. First Approximation says

    Wow, just when you think ConservaPOEdia can’t get any lower they create the article ‘Atheism and bestiality’, put a picture of PZ in there and talk about his daughter. (I’m not sure you can link to ConservaPOEdia here at the new site, but even if you can I don’t want to give them the traffic.)

  180. opposablethumbs, que le pouce enragé mette les pouces says

    Daughterspawn ecstatic about the very first thing she’s put her name down for at New Uni – she’s snagged a ticket to Jim Al-Khalili Meets Dara O’Briain!!!!! Should be absolutely brilliant; fascinating physics, plus the sharpest funniest most science-literate anti-clerical comedian ever – lucky Daughterspawn!

  181. Tigger_the_Wing says

    opposablethumbs,

    Lucky daughter indeed!

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Wheat intolerance: I am one of those lucky people diagnosed with gluten intolerance but not cœliac disease. The latter is one type of the former. Lose weight by giving up gluten?

    Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha… hehehehehehehehe… (excuse me!)

    Honestly, one of the signs of gluten intolerance is being unbelievably skinny despite eating vastly more than the recommended daily intake. Going (reluctantly) on a gluten-free diet helped me to put on 16kg (35lb/two-and-a-half stone) and get up to my recommended weight for my height.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Giliell, I feel for you. Peer-pressure is the pits, and it’s awful that it starts so early. “Why do you have to fo something just because your friends do?” is a time-honoured parental cry (and futile, because I suppose social skills and fitting in depend on such mirroring, (not that I’d understand, seeing as I didn’t do it properly (being autistic)))

  182. says

    Economics ARGH! moment: I got into a discussion on healthcare and pointed out the nature of fiat currency.

    Person I was talking to contested it and claimed gold standard, I cited the Nixon Shock and pointed them to the quote from Krugman on the wiki page, also referred them to Brad DeLong.

    They asked why the US still issues debt, I pointed out that the US government has since about 1980 been half run by idiots and half by charlatans.

    But, apparently, I’m oversimplifying things…

  186. ChasCPeterson says

    Nobody is eating any sodium azide. Like radiation, it’s used to cause mutations in seeds. Once the mutation is caused, in one seed, all subsequent generations will express it without sodium azide exposure.
    It’s a dishonest scare tactic.

  187. ChasCPeterson says

    I’m a physiologist, not a physician, but I read the wheat interview and it’s not obvious bullshit. It would take me way more time than I’ve got to follow up, but everything he says in there is at least plausible on the face of it.

    It’s not know-nothing glutenophobia.

    And at one intuitive level, humans most certainly did not evolve eating modern hybrid grains. It’s a “natural” food only by the most tenuous stretch of the word.

  189. ChasCPeterson says

    aaaaand there’s the stupid sarcastic narcissistic anecdote, as if on cue.

    Please, don’t let any new information puncture your self-centered worldview. You can continue to prevent that possibility by continuing to refuse to read anything for comprehension. Jerk your knee and stick to it, that’s the way it’s done.
    *yawn*

  190. says

    Meh… whatever the health effects, I’m not going to give up wheat any time soon. I can’t afford to restrict my diet any further; it’s hard enough feeding myself properly as a vegetarian. (And I’m vegetarian because of a sense of moral obligation, not for health reasons.*)

    (*Philosophically, I probably should be vegan; but given my current lack of cooking facilities, limited time and money, and lack of nutritional knowledge, it would be very hard to feed myself on a vegan diet. Though I guess that isn’t really an excuse.)

  191. says

    Also, cookies, cakes and pastries (all of which contain wheat) are the best things ever, and giving them up completely would make me pretty damn miserable. (Which is also another reason why I’m not vegan, though, again, this isn’t really a good excuse.)

  192. says

    Good morning!

    Yesterday I had a very interesting presentation by my Ethics office here at work. They brought in Thomas Jefferson to talk about the ethical dilemma of the founding of the United States.

    Well, he was a reenactor, anyway – looked an awful lot like the man, and had a rich Williamsburg accent. The two best things about it was that it was incredibly cerebral. He was talking with highly intelligent conversation, speaking like I suspect that President Jefferson would speak. It was not a silly “Hi kids, I’m Thomas Jefferson. I wrote the Declaration!” sort of presentation like the one I’d had earlier with Abe Lincoln.

    The other good thing was that he clearly represented Jefferson’s religious beliefs, although merely in passing with terms like “nature’s god.” It was really neat.

  193. Rev. BigDumbChimp says

    I’m a physiologist, not a physician, but I read the wheat interview and it’s not obvious bullshit. It would take me way more time than I’ve got to follow up, but everything he says in there is at least plausible on the face of it.

    Interesting. I’d like to know your take once you dig a little deeper.

  195. Tigger_the_Wing says

    I read the wheat interview, and on the face of it the chap made everything he said sound very plausible; it’s just that most of what I’ve previously read or experienced with regard to gluten intolerance has led me to see this idea of weight gain through eating wheat when intolerant as highly implausible.

    When I re-read the interview, it struck me that the guy reminded me of the ‘gluten causes autism’ brigade, with his strange notion that:

    …gluten-derived polypeptides can cross into the brain and bind to the brain’s opiate receptors. So you get this mild euphoria after eating a product made with whole wheat. You can block that effect [in lab animals] by administering the drug naloxone. This is the same drug that you’re given if you’re a heroin addict; it’s an opiate blocker.

    That just seemed weird. I thought there was this thing called the blood-brain barrier that blocked that kind of thing from happening. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

  199. dnebdal says

    Ha, I’m sort of proud of my co-citizens. A few years ago, there was a poll on support for assorted anti-terror surveillance and such (specifically, how easy it should be to get a warrant for tapping phone lines, if the police should be able to detain and search random people off the street, and if the police should be allowed to keep people for an indeterminate time without a court decision). Since then, we’ve had a guy blow up parts of central Oslo, and gun down a number of teens … and we’ve done the same poll again just after that.

    The results: Despite recent history, people are more negative to intrusive anti-terror policies.

    Also, choice quote from one of the survivors:

    I haven’t for a moment felt a need for revenge. It would be understandable, and I know a few feel it and are angry. But most of us don’t think it’s important. The only thing that’s important for me is that the perpetrator can’t do misdeed like this again. Beyond that it doesn’t matter if he has a flat screen TV in jail.”

    In your face, “it’s an insult to the survivors to not execute the perpetrators of mass murder” – crowd. :)

    Source: Original Norwegian, google translation

  201. theophontes, feu d'artifice du cosmopolitisme says

    @ Inane Janine

    Thanks for posting (that second song just transported me half a world and half a lifetime away).

    Try installing Minitube (Linky) then type in “The Pretenders” and settle back to a constant stream of music…. (It automagically looks for the songs you are looking for and then plays them in turn.)

  204. Rev. BigDumbChimp says

    I don’t know, this sounds like a bad idea to me.

    It was in 1976 that Thomas McCulloch, along with his gay lover Robert Mone, committed a notorious axe crime in which they murdered three people at a State Hospital in Scotland. McCulloch, now 63, was given a life sentence, but it’s since been commuted to allow him to become eligible for work release. So, said prison officials, here’s your axe … go chop those trees. And be back by 4 p.m., please.

    Thomas McCulloch completed a course at a nature reserve, where he helped clear a pathway by cutting trees and shrubs. A prison source said: “I don’t think it’s a good idea to let a murderer like McCulloch near sharp implements like axes.”

    In fact he did such a good job that he was presented with the John Muir Award (this is true), for demonstrating he had “discovered a wild place, explored its wilderness, helped to conserve it and shared the experience.”

  205. Dianne says

    Probably to balance out the weather. :D

    What’s wrong with the weather? The summers sound lovely and I’m sure the winters will be getting better over time. It’s the auslanderfiendlichkeit (sorry, don’t know how to say that in any scandinavian language) that balances out the positives.

  207. Algernon says

    hahaha… I forgot I was posting that here and not in email.

    Hence the self editing (emails don’t go out if they have naughty words in them)

  208. Algernon says

    The last one at least made “sense” insofar as she was killed by her ex husband after he got out of prison.

  212. says

    My Grams is has celiac disease, and weight gain is both her experience and what she was advised is the norm by doctors. She’s also found that preparing foods with substitutes for gluten-grains is tricky because half the time, recipes are just more fattening to compensate and “make things taste good.”

    When I re-read the interview, it struck me that the guy reminded me of the ‘gluten causes autism’ brigade

    I am concerned when I hear these types of anti-gluten arguments as well, since I know it’s major theme in for people claiming they can “cure” disorders that individuals come with: namely ASDs and ADD. I’ve seen these a few too many times for comfort. I remember the first time I stumbled across this book in a recommended reading section of a local bookstore; spouse was taken aback by my anger and frustration.

  213. Beatrice, anormalement indécente says

    Has anyone watched The Help? Reviews are either praising it or calling it rubbish because of the pandering to the white public. Is it worth watching just so that I could hate it or not even that?

  214. says

    I can’t express how relieved I am that this hectic, broken week is almost over. Between an endless litany of problems with work (closings running amok, having my work computer get completely hozed, on and on), car issues, worrying about getting painting prep work done, trying to help with my parents’ business madness and police escorting a crazed employee offsite and yesterday’s all-day migraine, I’m really ready to head into the weekend.

    I find painting calming and sometimes cathartic, so I’m looking forward to that.

  215. tdff says

    Hey! I’m a lurker, and I just wanted to pop out of hiding to let you guys know about this Whitehouse.gov petition to “remove tax exemption from churches and allow them to apply like a non-profit organization.”

    I’m not familiar with the site or how legitimate this is – the site looks legit, but their goal is a measly 5,000 signatures, so I don’t know how important it is.

    Here’s the link!

    https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#%21/petition/remove-tax-exemption-churches-and-allow-them-apply-non-profit-organization/Jbm5cr22

  216. Sally Strange, OM says

    So, I’m watching the results show of DWTS, and two things tickled me: First, Harry Connick Jr. is apparently “feeling the Chaz vibe.” Yay Chaz!

    Second, there was a summertime hit by “LMFAO,” which passed me by, but they had the group on to perform their narcissistic anthem to looking so sexy that everybody stop and stare. The beat was pretty good, which I suppose is all you can ask for in these types of pop hits, but it was sufficiently compelling that Carrie Ann Inaba and Bruno Tonioli got up on their judges’ desk and danced throughout most of the thing. Bruno even took his shirt off.

    First rate entertainment, I tells ya.

  218. dnebdal says

    @Dianne:

    Well, I’m not really fond of the cold – from October to May is a long, dreary dark stretch of cold hands and dripping nose and dry skin and ice on the ground and having to limit my random walks. The summers are perfectly fine, I don’t even mind the really rainy ones we sometimes get. (This October is already the wettest on record some places, and this entire summer has been memorably drenched. It’s sort of fun.)

    You’re looking for “fremmedfiendtlighet”, though “utlendingsfiendtlighet” would be understandable. There’s two different things that might be covered there: First of all is that it’s generally hard to come here as an adult and establish a normal social circle fast; we’re not the easiest people to get to know. I’m not sure if that counts, since it’s not that much easier if you e.g. move to Oslo from another part of the country.

    Secondly is the issue of how we treat the immigrants (especially the non-“western” ones) and their descendants; typified by the Pakistani and Somali.

    There’s an ongoing debate if we should slow down the number of immigrants accepted per year to focus more on the ones already here; not surprisingly the political scale goes from “we should accept far more refugees” on the left to “we should be extremely restrictive” on the outer right. The most anti-immigrant party lost a large chunk of voters in the elections a week ago, I’m happy to say. Speculation is that this is partially because the Utøya shooter identified with them.

    Relatedly,there is entire debate on multiculturalism (basically nutjobs vs. the rest, though), and on how/how strongly we should push things like women’s rights, opposition to religious indoctrination (and how do you define “indoctrination”, anyway?), LGBT rights, and so on onto the immigrant/descendant groups.

    There are some tabloidism (much was made of how the only violent backalley-style rapes in Oslo were done by African asylum seekers last year), the expected amount of scum in online discussions, and it’s still harder to get a job with an immigrant-sounding name. But all that said, it could be worse. Looking at the Pakistani community, the second generation is doing quite well; getting higher education at about the same rate as the country as a whole, and they’re not too far behind in employment numbers. There’s immigrant-background politicians and TV/radio/newspaper people, though the police would like more of them.

    On the scale of “formerly near-monocultural northern European countries that have had an influx of people from markedly different cultures the last decades”, I think we’re doing ok, but there’s obviously things that could be better. I genuinely don’t know what it’s like to grow up with an immigrant family background – I’m from countryside, which was rather uniformly pale until very recently, so I haven’t even got a firsthand outsiders POV.

  219. says

    Will try to get a good non-IDing pick of the ring later.

    Doing better emotionally though there’s some illness sweaping through the house :(. The issue isn’t as some have said of not finding a job persay, I’ll try to explain later tonight the odd situation.

  220. illuminata says

    Beatrice:

    Is it worth watching just so that I could hate it or not even that?

    I was guilted into going by an aunt (c’mon! its so rare all us girls get together!).

    It seemed, to me, like the script writer (and, presumably the novel’s author) was really trying to be non-racist, positive and inclusive – but did it in an embarrassing privileged white people way, including an almost-“Magical Negro” trope.

    My family, being full of polite, well-meaning, painfully clueless racists, loved it. For me it was a cringe-fest.

  221. Dianne says

    There’s an ongoing debate if we should slow down the number of immigrants accepted per year to focus more on the ones already here; not surprisingly the political scale goes from “we should accept far more refugees” on the left to “we should be extremely restrictive” on the outer right.

    Isn’t there everywhere? I find it kind of heartening that there’s a “focus on the ones already here” component to this debate. In the US the debate tends to have an unfortunate subtext of “and kick out the ones who already snuck in”. IIRC, Norway accepts far more asylum seekers per capita than the US, though the absolute number is lower. Does the right have any plans for improving integration of immigrants already there? And given the success of second generation immigrants, is it even necessary?

    I’m fine with October to May winters. I grew up in Dallas and after a childhood full of March to November summers, I’m fine with more cold. I do wonder about your summer mosquito quotient, though, given your description of summers as wet.

    Not that I’ll be moving any time soon…sigh. Who’d want a used American anyway?

  222. IndyM says

    @ Beatrice

    Illuminata is correct: it’s a cringe-fest. I haven’t seen the movie myself, but I’ve read many critiques of it, and it sounds horrible. Here’s a good review.

  223. says

    There’s an ongoing debate if we should slow down the number of immigrants accepted per year to focus more on the ones already here; not surprisingly the political scale goes from “we should accept far more refugees” on the left to “we should be extremely restrictive” on the outer right. The most anti-immigrant party lost a large chunk of voters in the elections a week ago, I’m happy to say. Speculation is that this is partially because the Utøya shooter identified with them.

    I consider immigration restrictions, and the accompanying practices of deportation, detention, exploitation of undocumented migrants, etc., to be morally indefensible. There is no convincing reason why a person’s civil rights and freedom of movement should be predicated on his or her nationality: considering that nationality is an arbitrary criterion, normally acquired either by being born on a particular part of the Earth’s surface or by being born to particular parents. To label people as “illegal immigrants”, and to detain them and deport them by force to poor and dangerous parts of the world, splitting up families and creating misery in the process, is a policy I cannot accept.

    Immigration restrictions, aside from being inhumane and dehumanizing, are also economically inefficient: a huge amount of economic potential is wasted because people are denied the freedom to move, live and work where they see fit, and businesses are denied the freedom to hire the best candidate for the job irrespective of nationality. The usual protectionist counter-argument is “we need to restrict immigration in order to protect our people’s jobs from foreign competition”; but it doesn’t take much thinking to see how absurd and arbitrary this is. Why should we arbitrarily deprive one section of the population (in this case, immigrants) of the opportunity to work in order to prevent them competing with another section of the population (in this case, native-born citizens)? Why should we be more concerned with one group’s livelihood than another’s? It sounds remarkably similar to the argument, which was being made not so very long ago, that women should not work because they were taking jobs away from men.

    Furthermore, imposing restrictions on migration doesn’t, in most cases, actually stop migration: if people are desperate enough for work, they will migrate with or without documents, taking substantial risks in order to do so. Imposing penalties on undocumented migration simply ensures that undocumented migrants live in fear, are outside the protection of the law, and are open to exploitation by traffickers and abusive employers.

    At the moment, international law distinguishes between refugees and asylum-seekers on the one hand, and economic migrants on the other. For states that are parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention (as most are), there is an obligation to take in refugees – that is, people who have a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their home countries on account of their “race, nationality, religion, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” – and to refrain from deporting them to their home countries. (Of course the process is often unfair in practice; in most countries, the hurdles to claiming asylum are extremely difficult to surmount, particularly for migrants with no money and no legal representation, and many people who should have been granted asylum end up being deported.) With economic migration, on the other hand, states generally have a sovereign right to admit as many or as few economic migrants as they see fit (with the exception of the European Union states, which cannot exclude economic migration from other member states).

    I’d say the distinction is pretty arbitrary: it fails to recognize that economic circumstances can put people in desperate situations, just as political, racial or religious persecution can. If one’s family is in danger of starving to death, is migration really a “voluntary choice”? And is it really morally acceptable to keep people in poverty artificially by limiting economic migration from poorer countries to richer countries?

    Relatedly,there is entire debate on multiculturalism (basically nutjobs vs. the rest, though), and on how/how strongly we should push things like women’s rights, opposition to religious indoctrination (and how do you define “indoctrination”, anyway?), LGBT rights, and so on onto the immigrant/descendant groups.

    This is a much more difficult area: but I’d say the law should protect everyone’s safety and autonomy, while simultaneously being tolerant of cultural differences. Cultural practices that involve the infliction of violence on the unwilling – female genital mutilation, forced marriage, corporal punishment of children, etc. – should, of course, be illegal, as they are in all developed countries. But minority communities should have the right to live according to their own cultural and religious convictions, provided that they do so peacefully and without violence; for instance, women should have the right to wear the burqa or the niqab in public, at school and in the workplace. (Banning these things, as France and Belgium have done, contributes to the oppression of Muslim women. It does nothing to protect abuse-victims: in fact, it drives them out of the public sphere entirely, putting them under virtual house arrest, and makes them even more dependent on their abusers. These laws are not an attempt to protect women; they are an attempt to impose Western cultural hegemony on an oppressed minority, and are motivated primarily by xenophobia.)

  224. Sandiseattle says

    So some talk upthread about gluten intolerance/food allergies.
    Discovering for myself that I’ve developed an intolerance (allergy?) to lima beans and to shrimp. At least those are the food that have made me sick recently. The shrimp may have been just poorly cooked or old or maybe it was MSG, both times shrimp made me sick it was in prepared food (buffet/deli). The lima beans also had some coincidences associated with them. As for gluten, I don’t know, I seem to be able to taste bread better these last few monthes. Eh, could just be quirky me.

  225. says

    Cultural practices that involve the infliction of violence on the unwilling – female genital mutilation, forced marriage, corporal punishment of children, etc. – should, of course, be illegal, as they are in all developed countries

    Self-correction: unfortunately, many US states still permit “corporal punishment” of children in schools, and most permit it in the home. (Along with the death penalty and inhumane prison conditions, this is one respect in which the US is out of step with the rest of the developed world.)

  226. chigau (曇) says

    According to my 2007 Pocket Criminal Code for Canada, only a “female person” can commit infanticide.
    huh.
    (Section 233 and Section 237)

  227. Dianne says

    The usual protectionist counter-argument is “we need to restrict immigration in order to protect our people’s jobs from foreign competition”;

    I remember one argument about immigration, I was presented with this argument. My response was, “You mean that Americans* are so stupid, lazy, and generally poor workers that only elimination of all competition can allow them to be employed?” Needless to say, this did not endear me to the protectionist with whom I was arguing.

    *The argument was about immigration to the US. Hence the use of “Americans” in this context. Not to ignore immigration issues in other countries.

  230. Beatrice, anormalement indécente says

    Thanks illuminata and IndyM.
    IndyM, that was one of the reviews I read. All the opposite, “such a lovely history lesson” ones, just make reviews like the one you linked sound even more true.
    I think I won’t bother. There are some good festival movies on offer, so I’ll spend my money in a better way.

  231. The Lone Coyote says

    http://www.lifebeforethedinosaurs.com/

    Apparently, according to Tricia’s Obligatory Art Blog, it is written by a seven year old. I haven’t read much of it yet, but it looks pretty accurate for being written by someone who was probably still pooping his diapers five years ago.

    And that Fieldia Lanceolata illustration is just precious!

  232. IndyM says

    @ Beatrice

    Have fun! Independents tend to be so much better than standard Hollywood fare anyway. :)

  233. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    That just seemed weird. I thought there was this thing called the blood-brain barrier that blocked that kind of thing from happening. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

    Yes, conventional wisdom is that large molecules like large peptides and proteins don’t get through. However, evolution left a back door that opens with the right key.

    (Been trying to post this from work all day. All attempts did not post.)

  234. Beatrice, anormalement indécente says

    IndyM, thanks. I’m sure I’ll find something good.

    They’re mostly showing European movies that won something in Cannes or Berlin or some other festival. I guess they threw in The Help because of the Hollywood effect. I’d usually go for a Czech dramedy, but there are none on offer. If nothing else, there is always that one crazy French comedy (with obligatory Gérard Depardieu).

  236. Sili says

    Have I mentioned lately that I love Lewis Black (second segment)?

    I want to start breeding program with him, Olbermann and Maddow. (There may be some slight problems with that, of course, but nothing roofies can’t fix, I’m sure.)

  239. chigau (曇) says

    I’m harvesting.
    Mostly herbs.
    So far I’ve done: thyme, lovage, oregano / marjoram, catnip, mint, sage, poppy seed, tomato.
    —
    parsley and basil are in pots, they can wait
    I really like Fall.

  242. chigau (曇) says

    And the tomatoes have actually ripened on the vine rather than on newspaper on the living-room floor.

  243. says

    I miss blf.
    +++++++++++++++++
    Well fuck, why not end a shitty week with a shitty day.

    I previously mentioned upthread how I was tasked to do a job and my boss approved my solution. It’s science, and my approach was the obvious correct one.

    We had a meeting yesterday, with 4 people including my boss and 2 other colleagues. It was agreed that my approach was the way to go.

    I got a talking to by my boss today. My co-worker (see upthread) complained about me after the meeting. I admit, I was not diplomatic, but numbers should trounce feelings in science.

    Today my boss told me she had never approved my approach and I should just do what my co-worker asked. (I haz witnesses that this is not true, but you can’t argue with the boss.)

    She explained to me that my co-worker has been having a tough time lately with other colleagues. (I suspect my co-worker has the same problem with other people that she did with me. Bad science.)

    So today I did exactly what my boss and co-worker asked. With not a bit of resentment, I’d said I’d be happy to do this all along, I just thought mine was a better approach.

    My co-worker complained about the results. JFC ona pilloried porcupine, wtf did you think would happen when you interpolate between data points instead of using the data that already exists between them!?

    I don’t make up the fucking data, I don’t wave a wand and get magic fucking results. The goddamn numbers are what the goddamn numbers are!

    So between my boss denying immediate history, and my co-worker denying reality, my day ended with a whimper.

    I felt like I was called out for ‘tone’ instead of content.

    The good news is that it’s my Friday and I don’t have to do anything but sail all weekend. I forget everything but my boat and the wind when I’m sailing.

  245. says

    chigau, it’s no wonder we have so many wool gatherers here … because a stitch in thyme …

    Yeah, that’s all I got.

    Thank you, I’ll be weak all here. Don’t forget to tip your cows and veal the waitresses.

  246. Rey Fox says

    I felt like I was called out for ‘tone’ instead of content.

    This happens surprisingly often, I hear. Sail away.

  247. Wowbagger, Madman of Insleyfarne says

    Am still having troubles with my netbook and FtB – I upgraded both my version of Firefox and my Ubuntu distro (am now on 10.10) and opening Ftb (or any of the pages) still crashes my browser. I tried adding Chrome but it crashes that, too.

    Anyone got any ideas?

  251. Wowbagger, Madman of Insleyfarne says

    Funnily enough, FtB was crashing my work PC (with Windows 7/IE8) all the time until I switched all the security options to minimum/off – which makes me think it’s an FtB problem rather than a platform/browser problem.

    Though why it doesn’t seem to be affecting anyone else is a concern…

  252. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    While I would like to hear from blf, it’s good that the mildly deranged penguin is off-line. The Redhead is making her split pea soup for dinner. So thick when refrigerated, it needs a knife to separate your planned over serving…

  253. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Though why it doesn’t seem to be affecting anyone else is a concern…

    Today, I tried from work to post a link to sci*tech*story*.com (remove splats) for an article (same as #233). Appeared to go without warning or explanation to the spam file. Any reason PZ?

  254. Dhorvath, OM says

    Sailor,
    Sounds like you have a case of stupourvisor. Take two days and call me in the morning. It’s not a cure, but it helps with the symptoms.

  255. Tigger_the_Wing says

    Nerd,

    Thank you for the article! =^_^=

    Don’t worry about the time taken; it was my night-time and I was asleep (and dreaming of interstellar travel, again).

    Sailor,

    I hate it when people gang up behind someone’s back. Enjoy your day(s) off.

    chigau,

    According to my 2007 Pocket Criminal Code for Canada, only a “female person” can commit infanticide.
    huh.
    (Section 233 and Section 237)

    Isn’t that because (so far) only a female person can give birth and therefore only a female person can get the kind of post-birth brain problems that can lead to them killing their newborn? I think it is a way of being compassionate to someone who is not their normal selves, not charging them with murder. It doesn’t mean that any random female can get away with killing any random infant, but is situation-specific.

  256. says

    Chas, it was a reference back to a part of the comment exchange that pre-dated yours. I was talking to chigau. You are not the centre of the universe. Speaking of “stupid narcissistic” comments…

  257. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Don’t worry about the time taken; it was my night-time and I was asleep (and dreaming of interstellar travel, again).

    I was annoyed at the time and number of posts needed to get past PZ’s moderation of what appears to be a scientific news web site. I tend to dream of work or the Redhead. (Waiting for the split peas to become less than al dente.)

  258. chigau (曇) says

    Tigger_the_Wing
    re infanticide
    My copy of the Criminal Code is bedside reading.
    There is some seriously weird, archaic stuff in there.
    If They™ mean the mother, They™ should say “mother”.
    I understand your charity toward Them™ but I doubt that such compassion exists in the Criminal Code.

  259. Wowbagger, Madman of Insleyfarne says

    Interestingly, using Windows on my netbook (I knew I kept dual-boot for a reason) I can get to FtB okay through Explorer.

    How odd.

  260. cannabinaceae says

    This I have stolen:

    Benjamin Franklin’s brain is kept alive in a vat upstairs in Monticello. This is the real reason you’re not allowed to go up there. Disembodied Ben oversees global Freemasonry therefrom.

  261. Rev. BigDumbChimp says

    Old school REM

    Only saw them a couple times, once in 1985 at the school I would end up going to High School a year or so later and in 89 at some now forgotten place.

  262. Wowbagger, Madman of Insleyfarne says

    I’ve gone for a third option – a browser called Midori. At least it actually loads, which is more than I can say for Firefox and Chrome. Unfortunately, I don’t think it has any kind of ad blocking capacity.

  263. John Morales says

    Wowbagger, regardless of what browser you use, you should be able to modify your hosts file so ad-serving domains get pointed to your localhost (127.0.0.1).

    (It’s what I did when I used Explorer)

  265. starstuff91 says

    There’s going to be a CFI event next month in my city. I really want to go but it’s $35, and I don’t know if I should spend that. I’d also probably have to go alone. I’ve never been to a CFI even or any other atheist/skeptic conference and this will probably be my only chance for a long time.

  266. says

    Isn’t that because (so far) only a female person can give birth and therefore only a female person can get the kind of post-birth brain problems that can lead to them killing their newborn? I think it is a way of being compassionate to someone who is not their normal selves, not charging them with murder. It doesn’t mean that any random female can get away with killing any random infant, but is situation-specific.

    Yes, this is correct. The parallel provision in English law is the Infanticide Act 1938, which provides, in section 1(1):

    Where a woman by any wilful act or omission causes the death of her child being a child under the age of twelve months, but at the time of the act or omission the balance of her mind was disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of giving birth to the child or by reason of the effect of lactation consequent upon the birth of the child, then, notwithstanding that the circumstances were such that but for this Act the offence would have amounted to murder, she shall be guilty of felony, to wit of infanticide, and may for such offence be dealt with and punished as if she had been guilty of the offence of manslaughter of the child.

    Basically, it deals with cases where women kill their children while under the influence of post-natal depression. In the days when a conviction for murder resulted in an automatic death sentence, it was felt that it would be grossly unfair to convict a woman of murder in such a circumstance; conversely, it was also felt to be inappropriate and unjust to find her legally insane, since this would lead to her being detained in a psychiatric hospital, with the associated social stigma. So the offence of infanticide was created, which, unlike murder, did not carry the death penalty. (The purpose of the Bill was explained here by Viscount Dawson of Penn, introducing the Bill in the House of Lords.)

    The offence of infanticide is now rather redundant – both because the death penalty has long since been abolished, and because the defence of “diminished responsibility” was introduced in the Homicide Act 1957, which fills a similar gap in the law. (It allows a defendant to be convicted of manslaughter rather than murder if he or she was suffering from a mental incapacity which “substantially impaired his [or her] mental responsibility for his acts”, but was not serious enough to amount to insanity.)

  268. Part-Time Insomniac, Zombie Porcupine Nox Arcana Fan says

    Have another grog on me, Sailor. It’s awful when the dunderheads at work gang up on you, especially when you know you’re right.

  269. lipwig says

    Good morning, world! The sping sun streaming in my window has made the room all golden and bright.
    I have woken in an very unusally good mood that was made better by the adorable Google logo today.
    Yay, for a good start to a Saturday, maybe I can get some stuff done today.
    And also yay to those days when I feel normal, so that I know that I can feel normal.

  270. chigau (曇) says

    Good night, lipwig.
    We had a lovely sunset today.
    Tomorrow I will make pesto.
    Lots and lots of pesto.
    Normal is GOOD.

  271. lipwig says

    @chigau
    I’m making bacon and feta pancakes for breakfast.
    I tried to make coriander pesto the other day, but it was missing something.
    What kind of pesto do you like making/eating?

  272. chigau (曇) says

    lipwig
    My pesto, this year, will be BASIL!!!!
    because (freakishly) I have lots this year.
    It will include garlic (my garden) and pine nuts (store-bought) and olive oil (store-bought).
    and maybe parsley (my garden) and tarragon (my garden).
    I ♥ Autumn.

  273. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    (ADMISSION: Thread Bankruptcy) —

    I’m stuck in Boulder, Colorado, at a conference of very well-meaning but really crunchy New Agey people. I can’t insult them as I was their keynote speaker this morning—and yeah, I had them pissing their pants laughing and also fired up—but oh my fuck. If I hear one more person tell me I need to “eat for my blood type,” and that “Western medicine thinks it knows X and Y” (after I’d just gotten done thanking Western medicine, that is, real medicine, for saving my life last December), and that “my gluten and dairy intolerance has really been a gradual progression as I went through the change,” I’m gonna cut someone.

  274. says

    *sigh*

    Went out to the local nightclub district tonight.

    Went to one club, sat down, and stayed in that seat for an hour and a half, just trying to figure shit out. No shit was figured out.

    Basically, I took my smashed hand and shoved it into a meat grinder.

    Tempted to make up for the drinking I should’ve done there. I’ve got a fifth of whiskey in the fridge and some gin in the freezer (don’t ask)… that should get me to morning pretty effectively. (Which morning? Do I give a shit? SPOILER: no.)

  275. chigau (曇) says

    Josh
    Keep up the good work.
    SMILE :) :) :)
    say “Bless your heart!”
    There are good restaurants, no?
    —
    I’m in my back yard.
    I think there are bats flitting about.

  278. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    There are good restaurants, no

    ?

    Thank fuck, yes. Ate my face off of some real Mexican food, and plan to do it again. Repeatedly.

    /Patsy Stone

    I think there are bats flitting about.

    Oooh, good! Our bat population in New England has been all but destroyed by White Nose Syndrome. It’s awful to go out in the evenings and see none of them. Never happened before in living memory.

    Cuddle your bats for us, and ask them to please send some relatives to repopulate us?

  279. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Benjamin, I’ll join you in the drinking. Here’s my glass of red to your shot. Cheers, babe.

  282. says

    Oh, that nasty Walton Family!

    I have to admit that I was shocked and saddened when watching the Waltons the other night. I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and it showed me just how far back this push for “tolerance” started.

    In this show, Jason Walton was dating a Jewish girl. The girl was confused about her religion and wasn’t even sure what it meant to be Jewish. She winds up being all upset and emotional and running off to talk to the new minister at the baptist church the Walton family goes to. (I know I called her a “girl” but she was a woman, full grown and in the army) What shocked me so much was what the minister did. He listened to her (good) and let her get everything off her chest and then proceeded to explain all about Judaism to her and gave her a book that had been given to him by a Jewish Rabbi about Judaism. He then told her that he’d find out where the nearest Temple was so she could start attending there! In the next scene the minister is giving his Sunday sermon which, believe it or not is all about tolerance. He says very proudly that they are “baptists” and the most important thing to remember is that their founder (can’t remember the name) had said that any good baptist was tolerant of other religions! Next was a scene of the Waltons at lunch and one of them paraphrases the minister saying that and indicate that as good baptists they should have been proud to help a Jewish person discover their beliefs.

    By then I was wavering between anger, disbelief and tears! That minister alone actually picked that girl up out of our Lord’s hands and forced her back into a false religion! I’m not at all against helping her understand her roots mind you, but instead of pushing her out the door and into a Temple, why not take the time to explain to her what her Jewish roots are and how wonderful it is and how God entrusted to her people His laws etc and take her from there and show her how God then sent His Son and how she could be saved??? That way she could have understood her roots AND been saved!!!

    Instead though, they tossed her to the wolves so she can spend eternity in hell while they all pat themselves on the back for being “good baptists!”

  283. John Morales says

    Benjamin, that’s quite a workout — one of the advantages of being a heavy guy.

    (And I bet you can do push-ups, even if they have to be of the kneeling variety. Mustn’t neglect your upper body!)

  284. chigau (曇) says

    My favorite Waltons episode was the one where they were burning German books and they came within a hair of burning a German language bible.
    Then everyone got all chagrined and went home.
    I don’t know if anyone was “saved” but they were sure chagrinified.

  286. plien says

    Sorry, this is a crosspost from https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2011/09/22/more-ugliness-laid-bare/

    I just think everyone should see this, it’s so great – i’m supergiddy now… (^.^)

    *****

    You allways need to watch the Rachel Maddow show (because Rachel is awesome!), but on friday 23 sept 2011 it aired a segment on this issue, so go over to http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/ and click on “missed the show?” it will be worth it if you wish you could do something back to those anti-abortionprotesters.

    Todd Stave is GREAT.
    Go support him at http://vochoice.org/

  288. triskelethecat says

    @The Sailor: I had a boss/coworker setup like that. I became very paranoid and insisted on everything being documented in an email so I had a “paper trail” of sorts. Good thing, too – boss tried to get me fired but thanks to my paper trail I had proof of what I said. (Many emails were simply: “to confirm what was discussed today, I will do x,y,z. If this is not correct, please let me know”. Since I never got corrections, she couldn’t say that what I was doing/heard was wrong.)

    @Joah: Colorado? You busy spokesgsy, you. Lots of travel.

    @All: 3 weeks to Rhinebeck! And we are going to have a blast. Looking forward to meeting all the Hordlings.

    @Sili: Do you want a picture of me emailed so you know what I look like for JFK, or shall I just hold up a sign that says Pharyngula Horde?

    @Caine: I saw that on FSTDT and LOL’d. Rarely watched The Waltons, so don’t recall the episode, but it’s always amusing when the RR people get SO bent out of shape about fictionalized characters.

    Today I am (currently) working, then going to the NY Ren Faire as it’s the final weekend, then spending the night with friends. I’ll be back to check on the Horde and TET tomorrow sometime.

  289. Antiochus Epiphanes says

    RE: Rise in celiac disease incidence, historical exposure to gluten

    I’m not sure that it even makes sense to discuss pre-agricultural exposure to gluten when explaining increase in the incidence of celiac disease. It seems simpler to consider this increase as part of a general increase in dysfunctional immune reactions (autoimmune and allergic) in industrialized parts of the world. The hygiene hypothesis explains this; a decrease in infectious pathogen exposure has resulted in an imbalance in the immune system between one branch that responds to viral/bacterial pathogens and another that may largely be responsible for responding to eukaryotic pathogens (metazoans/protists).

    IDK.

    Completely meaningless anecdatum: For the past three years I have been suffering sporadically from some gut disease that shares symptomology with celiac disease and Crohn’s disease (with a few other lovely symptoms thrown in) but I test positive for neither. I have burned through two gastroenterologists, and they really don’t have an explanation, other than I have some unidentified recurring gut infection, likely one that I caught in the tropics, where I do most of my field work. The strange thing is that since I have had these symptoms, I haven’t had so much as a sniffle, a cough, or a wheeze—I used to suffer from all kinds of allergies. Because I am not entirely rational, I cannot help but think that these two phenomena are somehow connected.

  290. says

    Another gay, mormon man has committed suicide.

    40 year old Bryan Michael Egnew spent the last decades of his life building up the courage to come out to his family and Mormon church. Once he did his life, family and religion were stripped away from him, and he committed suicide within a matter of weeks….
    Bryan Michael Egnew went on a Mormon Mission when he was 19, was married in a Mormon Temple to his wife Amy and had 5 children. He served within his local Mormon congregation for years, and outwardly was everything a Mormon man was expected to be. But inside, Bryan fought a constant struggle over whether to continue pretending, or to be honest about himself.

    One of Bryan’s friends, Jahn Curran, tells us that he has known Bryan since they attended college together at BYU. and like Bryan, Jahn was also hiding the fact that he was gay…. last month, Bryan found that courage and came out to his family and his church. The results were tragic. According to Curran, his wife Amy immediately packed up their children and drove them out of state to Tennessee, refusing to let Bryan see them. His parents and family withdrew, and his Church immediately excommunicated him because he refused to denounce his sexual orientation….

    despite the thousands of reported suicides among LGBT Mormons the Mormon high-leadership still refuse to put into place any official guidelines or provide training to local leaders on what to do when a person chooses to be honest about themselves. The result is the long trail of suicides of individuals who were left to face the wrath of local prejudices.

    Bryan Egnew’s case is made worse by the fact that his family has tried to suppress and hide what happened and who Bryan was since the suicide on September 10th, 2011. His obituary made no reference to the fact that he was gay or the horror that his Church put him through in the last weeks of his life. His Facebook page was scrubbed of any mention of the truth and family members blocked anyone who might tell Bryan’s story.

    How long will the Mormon Church continue to let their members die before they decide that LGBT people are worth being treated as equals?

    Calls to the Mormon Church for comment have not been returned.

    http://prideinutah.com/?p=11093

  291. says

    Caine: Well, if it turns out that there’s a god after all, and he (or she) is nasty and petty enough to send people to hell merely for joining the “wrong” sect and worshipping him in the “wrong” way, then he’s an asshole who I wouldn’t want to worship anyway. :-/ As Mill put it, “I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures.”

  292. says

    Additional info for post #286: Here’s a link to the segment in which Rachel Maddow interviewed Todd Stave last night.
    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#44648901

    Prior to the interview, The Maddow Show provided some background that described the tactics of anti-abortion groups: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#44648897

    Since Todd Stave’s supporters have been returning the calls of anti-abortion harassers, the anti-abortionists are begging to be taken off the call list. Stave’s supporters have been resolutely polite, beginning the phone conversations with, “Thank you for your thoughts on this issue,” or something similar. Still, the anti-abortionists can’t take a dose of their own medicine.

    The anti-abortionists are the ones who put all of Todd Stave’s information on a website, organized protests, complete with bloody (fake) pictures, outside Stave’s daughter’s middle school, called and emailed Stave relentlessly accusing him of supporting murder, etc. etc.

    What’s really interesting about Stave fighting back is that, according to him, about 80% of the anti-abortionists back off, with most of them saying they won’t take part in such campaigns again — this result only comes after one stands up to the bullies. If we could get rid of 80% of the anti-abortion harassers that way, it would be well worth the effort.

    Of course the hardliners, that remaining 20%, probably contains the bombers and shooters.

  293. pelamun says

    Yeah, I’m in the same camp, usually I find Lewis Black annoying too.

    Walton, I find your stance towards immigration restrictions commendable as a principle, but let’s face the political realities here: national sovereignty or some kind of supra-national sovereignty within the EU is still in play, and isn’t going away. Most European nations are afraid of what would happen if the restrictions went away. A lot of it is of course panic-mongering, but has anyone done any serious studies what would happen? How many people that would be expected to find jobs in which sectors would come to which countries in the EU, etc? As long as it can reliably demonstrated that no “deluge” would occur, no political party in Europe can demand open borders without being punished at the next round of elections.

  294. pelamun says

    Does anyone else here find Matthias Matussek an insufferable douchebag full of himself? He’s trying to become the next Andreas Englisch, the bestest friend forever of the pope…

    Sneering about how the Catholic Church should avoid “protestantisation”, and focus on the main things (I think Ratzinger called it “the mystery of faith”), and not keep coming back to such booooring issues such as celibacy, admitting women to priesthood, gay marriage etc, or even sharing the communion with Protestants… (and here Matussek shows himself to be totally fine with misogyny when he writes “in the Elizabethan theatre, women’s roles were played by men, nowadays for reasons of political correctness, a female quota would be called for in the Jesuit order”). Stupid German Catholics daring to demands reforms instead of concentrating on the mystery of faith, how dare they with German Catholics being only 2% of Catholics world-wide…

    Back in the day when I was an agnostic (no member of any church though) this would have been where I would have lost hope in reconciliation of Lutherans and Catholics, but today I couldn’t care less… The quicker the 2% get out of the church, the better I say…

  296. says

    A heart attack, two bowel obstructions, various unconscious teenagers, a kid with his penis shaft caught in a jeans zipper, and a baby born in the carpark. Just another night at the office…I will be back among the living(and blogging) tomorrow !

  297. KG says

    I have burned through two gastroenterologists, and they really don’t have an explanation, other than I have some unidentified recurring gut infection, likely one that I caught in the tropics, where I do most of my field work. The strange thing is that since I have had these symptoms, I haven’t had so much as a sniffle, a cough, or a wheeze—I used to suffer from all kinds of allergies. Because I am not entirely rational, I cannot help but think that these two phenomena are somehow connected. – Antiochus Epiphanes

    You’re probably aware of this, but there is some evidence hookworm infection cures allergies and other autoimmune problems.

  298. Birger Johansson says

    The Jemenite president-for-life is back in Yemen again, and is having police and the army shooting at demonstrators. Some of the soldiers have switched sides and are trying to protect the demonstrators.

    The Gothenburg book fair is in full swing and punk rock icon Nina Hagen is there with her autobiography. Apparently she found God -literally- during an LSD trip when she was 17. I would mock anyone else saying that, but in case of Nina Hagen she is merely being consistent in being who she is. Also, she can claim to belong to the same religion as Ratzinger, which will no doubt irritate him.

    Putin and Medvedev have agreed to switch jobs again, since the constitution does not allow anyone to stay president more than two terms. There will be a pro forma election next year to confirm the arrangement, just like in the Soviet days. The government-controlled media are no doubt enthusiastic.

  299. Eichbaum says

    Today we took our daughter (~2.3 years old) to a local park to hang her pacifiers on a tree dedicated for exactly that purpose (we left out the pacifier-fairy bit). She took it much better than we did, though it became clear around nap time that she didn’t exactly grasp the permanence of the situation. Nap time was aborted; bedtime tonight was not thenceforth something looked forward to.

    Indeed, bedtime, when the pacifier was brought up, started with heart-wrenching whines of “Get it back. Get it back.”, followed wailing and tears on the child’s side of thing and intense feelings of guilt on the parents’ side. It ended with her crying herself to sleep on daddy’s lap (relatively quickly, thankfully, due to the aforementioned missed nap).

    Ok, sorry for that. Extremely rare commenter here, but I had to get that off my chest somewhere. The thing I felt worst about was the arbitrariness of the decision to do it today vs. the fact that a pacifier has been a constant companion in her life to this point (in bed, at least). I’m sure she’ll get over it fairly soon, but still, this is probably the first time we’ve intentionally done something that we knew would probably make her sad.

    There, I feel a bit better; it might have been the gin and tonic, though.

  301. kristinc says

    I clung to my pacifier long enough that my mom made a rule I could have them only at home (but I must have been pretty small still, since I remember the tiny umbrella stroller I was riding in at the time, and believe you me, my mom would not have wheeled around a preschooler). Then I think she just stopped replacing them as they got bitten through or lost.

    I distinctly remember looking for the last pacifier in the house. I remember what it looked like. I remember that when I couldn’t find it I had more of a “Huh. Well, maybe it’ll turn up tomorrow” feeling than anything else.

  302. Eichbaum says

    Perhaps she would have stopped on her own, but we’ve heard if they don’t, it gets harder to get them off of it the older they get. But, then, you hear lots of things as a parent, so who knows.

    We’re living in Europe at the moment, and we see a good number of older kids here (4 years old?), but in the a lot of the US, it’s seen as yet another sign of parenting-gone-wrong if your toddler has a pacifier. Not that we particularly care about that, but we’re moving back to the US next year, so we’d thought we’d get it out of the way now before she got a bit older and maybe got made fun of for it. Plus, her dentist is definitely not a fan of pacifiers, since they may cause an overbite and whatnot if they’re still used at 4 or 5, it’s claimed.

    Anyway, it was a good time schedule-wise for us to do it, and the pacifier tree gave us a bit of a ceremony to make it a special occasion for her, so I think we did the right thing, which is all you can really try to do as a parent. Someone out there will always second-guess you, though (not saying you were, The Sailor).

  305. Sili says

    @Sili: Do you want a picture of me emailed so you know what I look like for JFK, or shall I just hold up a sign that says Pharyngula Horde?

    I assumed we would be carrying cephalopods.

  306. chigau (曇) says

    I didn’t have a pacifier either.
    I don’t remember any kids my age or slightly younger having one.
    I’m 56.
    Maybe it’s a recentish “fad”.

  307. KG says

    I’m another who never had a dummy (that’s Brit for pacifier). So I sucked my thumb instead – until I was around 6, when my parents pestered me into stopping. My son had dummies, but gave them up quite early (at 2?), and I don’t even remember how it happened. But then he’s always been an easy child. I still remember the tantrums he had when he was 2 – both of them.

  308. kristinc says

    The Pfft! says:

    Pacifiers were a development of hard teething rings, but they were also a substitute for the softer sugar tits, sugar-teats or sugar-rags[3] which had been in use in 19th century America. A writer in 1873 described a “sugar-teat” made from “a small piece of old linen” with a “spoonful of rather sandy sugar in the centre of it”

    … Pacifiers were settling into their modern form around 1900 when the first teat, shield and handle design was patented in the US as a “baby comforter”.[7] Rubber had been used in flexible teethers sold as “elastic gum rings” for British babies in the mid-19th century.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacifier

  309. says

    YesYouNeedJesus is back:

    I was warned that posting on this site leads to ad-hominem attacks and very little substance. I guess they were right. They also warned that if I argued with intelligence that I would be kicked of the site. Let’s find out if I’m intelligent then, shall we?

    Dhorvath, OM said, “What the hell? Real people with hopes and dreams being destroyed in industrial complexes is nothing like potential people being prevented from developing.”

    Would you mind telling me whose standard you are using to come to your definition of “real people”?

    What is the exact moment that a potential human being becomes a human being?

    You claim that abortion prevents (potential) people from developing. Are you saying that the boys and girls in the ovens at Auschwitz and the men and women in the showers at Hadamar were no longer developing?

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2011/09/22/more-ugliness-laid-bare/comment-page-1/#comment-70785

  310. says

    Kristinc, I think for those of us in our 50s, who didn’t have any type of pacifier, it was just the parenting ideas of the time. I remember being told that in the 1950s, the school of thought was that bottle feeding was ideal, much better than breastfeeding, early weaning was the thing du jour, etc. Schools of thought on parenting change often and radically from one generation to the next.

  311. Invisible Dragon says

    You want to hope the kid will get tired of the pacifier by time the other kids tease them, at the very least. That said, I worked with a young woman (18-23 yrs old) who was never without her pacifier – including at work. *sigh* And yeah, she was a cashier in retail.

    My kid had one, but I think he lost it or the cats took it when he was around a year old. He didn’t seem to care.

  313. kristinc says

    Yeah, my own kids were never very interested in pacifiers. I offered my son one when he was a couple months old and going through a fussy period, and I think he used it for a couple weeks and couldn’t be bothered. I never saw a reason to offer one to my daughter. I don’t feel strongly either way, kids are just all different.

    I think the prevailing school of thought a generation ago was more about not letting children be “spoiled” than it tends to be now (even to not feeding babies till the clock said it was time, not picking up a crying baby etc). Pacifiers and thumb sucking would definitely have been no-nos under that philosophy.

  315. says

    starstuff:

    @ Caine
    What’s with that idiot?

    You mean YYNJ? Eh, the usual. They are simply one more of the many goddist lifers who have showed up here. Most of the abortion threads that have taken place on Pharyngula have gone into the thousands of comments, with plenty of lifers showing up. Although, I will say that we usually don’t get the serious holocaust lifers like YYNJ.

    It’s frothing at a high rate over in the thread now, chomping at that Godwin bit. Idiot.

  316. pelamun says

    My grandmother used to give my father a pacifier with sugar to make him quiet, in the end ruining his teeth. When my mother had me, she still recommended the same thing to her, but luckily she did not and left it up to me to ruin my teeth by myself if I ever were so inclined…

  317. starstuff91 says

    I read his post and I don’t even understand what point he was trying to make. How is it that people can use words in an acceptable order, and yet not say anything that makes sense?

  318. says

    I read his post and I don’t even understand what point he was trying to make.

    A lot of lifers believe that abortion is a holocaust, equal to (and greater than) Hitler’s holocaust. They feel that anyone who is pro-choice is equivalent to a nazi, happily chucking tiny babies into the furnace, so to speak. It’s extremely difficult to have any discussion with these people.

    I suggest a little reading:

    Abortion Holocaust

    Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust

    American Death Camps (Guard your eyes on this one)

  319. starstuff91 says

    Thanks Caine. I’m going to really piss this person off. Oh, this will be so fun. I love trolling religious trolls :D

  321. says

    Eichbaum, thanks for understanding I wasn’t criticizing.

    I don’t think I ever had a pacifier. I do remember crawling out of my crib and stealing my baby brother’s bottle. It was full of Coca-Cola. Nom, nom, nom.

    Yep, that’s how we rolled.

  322. chigau (曇) says

    The Sailor
    Coca-Cola in a baby bottle, forsooth.
    I bet you lived in a trailer-park.
    [end bigotry]
    Were we neighbors?

  325. cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniac says

    What’s with that idiot?

    Jesus.

    Succinctly put.

    (And never mind that there’s no “there” there. That’s…immaterial.)
    –
    Game!
    –

  326. Therrin says

    <3 Stormageddon.

    Don’t read this yet:
    v svtherq gung jnf jub gur rlrcngpu jbzna jnf (fgvyy fcrphyngvba bs pbhefr)
    —
    Some cool vids were made for SGU24, can’t wait till the Truefellas one gets posted.

  328. chigau (曇) says

    Invisible Dragon @311

    …. I worked with a young woman (18-23 yrs old) who was never without her pacifier…

    What The everloving Fuck?

  330. Therrin says

    When I was in junior high/high school, there were trends where I would sometimes see girls with pacifiers. Don’t recall any that went from 0m-18y nonstop, though.

  332. says

    John:

    what is the problem with that?

    It causes near fatal eyerolls in actual adults.

    Chigau, it was a fashion for a while (in the U.S.) for young adults to wear a pacifier around their necks and use them whenever. Kind of like young adults wearing pajamas out and about.

  334. says

    I was under the impression that pacifiers were part of the rave culture. Probably has something to do with MDMA: “Involuntary muscular activity and muscular tension sometimes occurs, resulting in twitches and cramps. The lower face muscles are especially prone to this, causing jaw clenching and teeth grinding. This ‘gurning’ effect has long been a joke in clubland.” (source)

  337. says

    I think the adult dummy use has something to do with rave culture and ecstasy and stuff. The usual cliche here is that they suck on Chupa-chup lollipops, but you do see the odd dummy. Usually on someone wearing lurid pink hair and dressed in ginormous trousers made of muppet fur and chenille bedspreads. (Young people nowadays, gotta love ’em.)

  339. John Morales says

    Caine:

    I would guess you’ve never had to work with an adult who is dressed in pajamas and slippers and sucking on a pacifier.

    Nope.

    I have, however, had to work with adults who:
    * Put gunk in their hair and paint on their faces
    * Dangle bits of cloth from their necks
    * Wear thick layers of clothing indoors and complain that the air-conditioning is not turned up high enough
    * Chew gum
    * Were incompetent at their jobs

    (This is common enough that I spare my eyeballs the exercise)

  340. John Morales says

    BTW, I worked for EDS for a while; I too had to wear layers of clothing, shiny shoes (no tassels allowed, though!) and dangle a bit of cloth from my neck.

    (I quit)

  341. says

    John:

    * Put gunk in their hair and paint on their faces

    Done that, doesn’t bother me.

    * Dangle bits of cloth from their necks

    Done that, doesn’t bother me.

    * Wear thick layers of clothing indoors and complain that the air-conditioning is not turned up high enough

    Done that, it’s mildly annoying.

    * Chew gum

    Done that, and depending on the type of chewer, can be incredibly annoying.

    * Were incompetent at their jobs

    Done that, definitely annoying.

    There’s a reason I’ve worked for myself for over two decades.

  342. starstuff91 says

    A great and fun episode, IMHO.

    It’s been amazing so far. Way better than the last few episodes.

  349. John Morales says

    I’m the cat that escaped! :)

    (American company, founded by Ross Perot (had a culture of Perot-worship), won a contract in South Australia back in 1995 to take over Government mainframe operations. I either transferred to them or lost my job. Company was bought out by Hewlett-Packard not long after I quit.)

    I got nothing good to say about them; they were extremely hypocritical — lots of talk about serving clients, but in reality they cut corners and did the least they could.)

  352. says

    triskelethecat, my thanks to you and everyone who voiced (wrote) support.

    My job can be terminated at any time for no reason. It’s a weird conundrum about gaining enough success that you can have it taken away on a whim.

    I really like my boss, and she was standing up for a co-worker. I appreciate that part. The bad science will not make it into a paper. I’m not in danger of losing my job … at least until we run out of grant money;-)

  353. John Morales says

    Caine, I think I’ve previously mentioned here how I (and many of my colleagues) were bemused at the emphasis placed during the recruiting phase of the (admittedly excellent) health and dental plan that EDS provided as part of our remuneration, and it was only after reading about the health system in the USA that it clicked. A bit of a cultural divide, there.

    (At the time, most of us would have preferred more money, less benefits)

  355. tim rowledge, Ersatz Haderach says

    (Young people nowadays, gotta love ‘em.)

    Just check to make sure they’re not too young or people will think you’re a priest.

    http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/09/16/fukushima-japan-goes-to-war/

    The comments are even better.

    Good grief – you have an interesting definition of ‘better’ in use there, F. Wow.

    In re Tigger’s good news
    a) congratulations, enjoy
    b) I hope you live somewhere that has a sensible health system. A similar scare happened to a 14yo girl friend a few years ago (when I lived in the United States of DeathPenalties) and after the good news came the bad – no coverage ever again for any possible breast cancer issue! Please tell me things have improved…
    c) and, desperately hoping no one thinks I’m being all MRA, please everyone note that breast cancer is a disease with no care of your gender. You got breast tissue? You got breast cancer risk. Around the same time as b) my female GP pointed out that she had lost 3 male patients to breast cancer in three months; no early detection etc because of the “it’s a womans problem, men don’t get it” attitude. Yes it’s 1% of the total breast cancer statistics but if anyone tries to tell me that makes it unimportant I will crawl down their internet connection and fart in their general direction.

  356. starstuff91 says

    The next episode is the season finale of Doctor Who, and then there’s nothing until Christmas. That’s a lot of time without Doctor Who :(

  358. says

    Tim Rowledge, no, the health care situation has not improved. More people every day find themselves in a situation of no health coverage.

    I doubt you’d find any regular here giving you any grief about male incidence of breast cancer.

  359. F says

    Good grief – you have an interesting definition of ‘better’ in use there, F. Wow.

    Well, better for breaking brains.

    Apologies.

  361. chigau (曇) says

    Too late, but:
    John Morales
    re: an adult with a pacifier
    Wouldn’t that be a lesser being?

  363. theophontes, catherder extraodinaire says

    I got nothing good to say about them…

    Except of course for the advert. Classic.

  364. says

    No one got my ‘apparent’ – ‘a parent’ pun. Or you all rightfully ignored it for the content.
    ++++++++++++++++++++
    I’m watching Alice In Wonderland (2010 w/ Depp, et al)

    The Red Queen reminds me of my ex-GF. In looks, not behavior.
    +++++++++++++++++++
    Why yes, I have been imbibing, why do you ask?

  369. Orange Utan says

    @Benjamin

    John: More likely, it’s spam posted via the pingback mechanism.

    Yep. If you’re using a custom stylesheet you can hide them.

    .pingback { display: none; }

  371. chigau (曇) says

    John Morales

    (You sure you want to wake me up?)

    Hell, yes!
    I can sleep-in tomorrow.
    waddayagot?

  373. kristinc says

    Benjamin: Not ashamed to say “A Sesame Street Celebration” has a permanent spot on my iPod.

  374. John Morales says

    chigau, if the deed is done due to insecurity (whether from innate need or for fear of non-comformance), then sure, in that regard they’re a lesser person than those who lack such a need or fear.

    (Just like wearing a tie or make-up)

    —

    And I’m out of here, mother in law and partner have come to lunch.

    (I’ve made quiche!)

  375. says

    Tom Smith’s note on the song:

    Jim Henson was a hero of mine. He was creative, he was loving, he made his living helping children learn and making people laugh. It is a wonderful tribute to his talent and power that, when NPR played an old interview with him and Kermit, you could hear the announcer’s sad little smile when he apologized for the vocal quality: the sound man had miked the frog. When Mr. Henson died, I had to do something — and I had to do it quickly, because MarCon was in three days. In a fitting burst of weirdness, this song was written on The Steps at the MarCon hotel, while the con was going on around me, and immediately after writing “Bimbo Wizard”. I went back up to the hotel room, sang it until I could sing it twice without breaking down, then did my concert, and broke down anyway. That was my first standing ovation. The song won a Pegasus award for Best Filk Song in 1991, and helped me to also win Best Performer and Best Songwriter awards that year. This is my dad’s favorite song of mine. But I think and hope no one will be offended if I say that I wish it had never been necessary for me to write it. We miss you, Jim.

    Life is unfair, so they tell me,
    Because they think I wouldn’t know.
    They only can see a cheap gimmick
    On their children’s favorite show.

    They say, “Oh, that’s just foam and a wire,
    Attached to a green velvet sleeve,
    Anyone can do that” — well, that’s true, I suppose,
    But who else could make them believe?

    What can I say without you there to guide me?
    How else am I supposed to give?
    How can I sing without you there beside me?
    How else am I supposed to live?

    You could never just do the expected,
    I was just an idea in a bog,
    But you sewed up your dream and we made quite a team,
    Jim and Kermit, a boy and his frog.

    It was me, Rowlf, and you, but I think that he knew
    There was something that you and I had.
    The magic we made just kept growing,
    And none of it ever was bad.

    Then came Ernie and Scooter and Gonzo,
    Doctor Teeth, Cookie Monster, and more.
    But now all of those voices are silent,
    And I want to go on… but what for?

    No one can make me what you did,
    No one could walk in your shoes,
    Nothing can make me forget you,
    But that’s not a thing that I’d choose.

    I can’t just let it be over,
    And you wouldn’t want it that way,
    So I’ll stand up and I’ll face it,
    And, though not quite in your voice, I’ll say:

    I will go on without you there to guide me,
    There’s so much more I can give.
    Whenever I sing, you will be there beside me,
    As long as I keep you, you’ll live.

    We just wanted to make people happy,
    I was always much more than your toy.
    I will never regret and I’ll never forget
    What we had,
    I’ll miss you, Dad,
    This frog and his boy.

  376. Ibis3, féministe avec un titre française de fantaisie says

    Loved the Doctor tonight, but he seemed so melancholy. It will be great to see how the whole River killing the Doctor thing works out.

    *****spoilers*****

    So Matt’s back for another series, but will Karen Gillan be rejoining him or will there be a new companion?

  377. chigau (曇) says

    … the sound man had miked the frog …

    Everyone knows Kermit is REAL.
    I know I do.
    —-
    John Morales
    catch you later
    —-
    Ben Geiger
    sweet!

  378. kristinc says

    Not too long ago I was watching some first-season Saturday Night Live with Mr Kristin. You all may or may not know that Jim Henson did some slightly more adult themed Muppet stuff for the early SNL seasons.

    Well we were watching along and it was pleasant and humorous but not too impressive really, and finally we reached an episode where one of the Muppets had a “one-on-one” conversation with Gilda Radner. And bam, magic. That was where it happened, where Henson and his crew were so special — interaction between human and Muppet made the Muppets seem more real by comparison, not less.

  379. starstuff91 says

    I hope the Doctor gets another companion. Amy seems to be doing fine and I certainly didn’t miss her this episode.

  383. kristinc says

    Caine: Maybe that’s the episode I was thinking of. Maybe I misremembered and it was Lily Tomlin having a chat with that Muppet. I don’t know why I get those two comics mixed up, because they really do have their own distinctive styles and voices, but I do.

  384. Rev. BigDumbChimp says

    <It is, however, I found it to be a compelling look into obsession and the desire for perfection.

    Yeah I’m getting that. Only about 1/3 through.

  387. Invisible Dragon says

    Re the pacifier adult:

    She was the daughter of a store manager, frequently showed up for work in fuzzy slippers and things that looked a lot like pajamas. I’m clueless on rave culture, but this was around 20 years ago. Possibly? I do know she only ever took the pacifier out of her mouth to talk, eat or drink.

    She was certainly precious.

  388. Therrin says

    So Matt’s back for another series, but will Karen Gillan be rejoining him or will there be a new companion?

    (link above added via Pfft)

    I hope he’ll at least have a new “permanent” companion.

  390. says

    KG @ 297,

    You’re probably aware of this, but there is some evidence hookworm infection cures allergies and other autoimmune problems.

    I’m not aware of a connection with allergies, but with autoimmune gut diseases like Crohn’s. The idea is that human guts used to be colonised with worms for millions of years until like, 100 years ago, and nowadays our immune system is kinda just sitting there and twiddling its thumbs wanting some action.

  391. cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniac says

    The idea is that human guts used to be colonised with worms for millions of years until like, 100 years ago, and nowadays our immune system is kinda just sitting there and twiddling its thumbs wanting some action.

    ♫ Lookin’ fer bugs in all the wrong places… ♫
    –

  392. says

    Arguing with an idiot on the local paper’s site:

    Yes it is an Arabic name for God which is why Islam chose that name. But that still doesn’t change the fact of the matter which is Islam’s god is created from the pagan moon god with and a more acceptable name(Allah).

    [I respond] Nope. The Quran itself says that Allah is the same god as Yahweh. No moon god involved.

    Yes I understand that Quran says that, but that still doesn’t change the fact that Islams god is a representation of the moon god with an Arabic name of the real God Yahweh. False religions can claim all they want in their “holy book” that their god is real but that doesnt change its origin.

    And he said the last sentence without a hint of irony.

  393. Sally Strange, OM says

    OMG I just got a ticket for driving with no insurance.

    I fuking hate being poor and all this shit. Sorry, sorry, I should have had insurance. But it’s hard to afford on unemployment. Fuck me.

  394. julian says

    @Sally Strange

    Poverty sucks and no matter how many people tell you others have it worse it’s hard to not notice the distinct sucky quality of constantly being penalized for it.

  395. says

    Just in case anyone is feeling happy, here’s an antidote (pfft, why should I be the only one crying on a Sunday !) :

    Amy Winehouse – To Know Him Is To Love Him

    This Blake guy better not cross my path, ever. A sentiment I seem to share with three quarters of the world population. According to Youtube, anyway…(hint : there are even more personal versions of this on YT, including some with very personal pics, I opted for something that shows Amy, not the guy)

  397. says

    Good morning
    Urgh, I caught the first cold of the season.
    And of course it was last night, when I needed all the sleep I could possibly get that my kids decided they needed all mummy they could get…
    Of course they won’t do that any ordinary night when you have the power and stamina to deal with it…

    David M.
    *over from the Troy Davis thread*
    IIRC the data shows that repeating a year for failing a class is pretty useless. Sure, there’s always somebody who was just lazy and who gets the message when they have to repeat, but it’s a rather small minority.
    The practise of letting people fail and then repeat doesn’t ever ask why they failed in the first place. If they failed because they didn’t understand the subject, making them take the exact same class again is about the same approach you find in people dealing with foreigners (or in case of tourists natives): if they didn’t understand you the first time because they don’t understand the language, repeat slowly and loudly.

  398. John Morales says

    Giliell, I’m just about to to watch (a recorded) Dr Who with my better half, and take this opportunity to reassure you that I consider you a pretty impressive commenter, and that I bear you no animus.

    (And I hope that this notapology is revealing)

  399. says

    *gnarf*
    brushed off some dust from the laptop and by a freak chance hit submit….

    OK, contiunued from #398
    Now, if students fail a class for other reasons, like for example personal or health problems, then just making them repeat, ripping them out of their social circle, placing them into a new group where they’ll be immediately branded as “the stupid one who didn’t make it the last time” won’t help either. It will only get them more into the mode of assumed inadequacy.
    Tutoring is a really good solution, but it must start once you see that they’re having trouble clompleting a class. It’s not like you notice 2 weeks before the term’s end that the kid has troubles understanding the basics.

    As for dictation:
    They don’t work at all. Nobody is ever supposed to write in a situation students are supposed to write in when completing a dictation: remembering what the teacher said, writing it down correctly the first time while probably already listening to what the teacher is saying again. Nobody, not even secretaries in the good old pre-tape-recorder times were supposed to do that.
    The state of the art in checking their spelling ability is to make them write a text of their own: they will use words they know (do I need to mention that I once ran into the word “Feuilleton” in a dictation in third grade?), write at the pace they are comfortable with and are able to review the text more easily themselves.
    It still gives the teacher the possibility to evaluate the thing, it just takes a bit more time.

    @adult pacifier
    Hmpf, I can’t help to notice that they simply have a huge “feel good” factor. Suckling is one of our first pleasurable experiences, after all. Using the typical method of parents all over the world to quickly clean a pacifier when outside which is to use your own mouth, I discovered that it always takes a bit of willpower to stop and hand it back…
    Maybe that’s also why giving oral sex feels so good: adult size pacifier…

  400. says

    OK, and reading a bit up:

    pacifiers for kids
    My oldest one was a “true breastfed” child. Even when I didn’t breastfeed. She despised everything made from rubber or silicone in her mouth and when I was working, my mum and mum in law had to spoon-feed her her milk. Therefore pacifier never happened, but she considered me to be her personal pacifier…
    The little one wasn’t able to grasp my breast for the first weeks (small mouth, big boobs), so she got used to a pacifier.
    Since I dislike kids running around with a pacifier while they’re awake and happy, I tied a plushy rat to her pacifier, hoping that she would find this too uncomfortable. And for the usual question: No, it’s not heavy, it’s much lighter than the usual wooden chains.
    Well, as a result she doesn’t only have a pacifier all day long, but also a plushy friend…
    If she doesn’t see it, she’ll forget about it unless she’s tired or hurt, but if she sees it she has it.

    pelamun
    Yep, it’s rather arrogant of those German catholics to assume that they should have a tiny bit of a voice, a possibility of democratic influence and the ability to think for themselves.
    Democracy is truely evil, it get’s people to expect it everywhere…
    But I couldn’t help noticing the hipocrysy of those thousands and thousands of fanboys and girls cheering the pope:
    Tomorrow, they will still use contraception while having sex with their partner. They will still probably donate money for organisations that provide real healthcare and family planning in Africa. In short, they disagree with him on almost every issue, but still they cheer him on, spend time and money to see him.
    That’s like taking two days off and spending 200€ on a trip to a concert of a band that usually makes me turn off the radio.

    As for Ratzinger himself:
    Disgusting. I saw the tiny piece of his sermon where he “alluded” in the widest possible sense of the word to the child abuse scandals and said that it shocks when people find out that there are weeds amongst the wheat.
    Sickeningly disgusting. Now, even leaving his own role in the whole thing apart, and nonwithstanding that those who commited the abuse are horrible criminals, to speak of people as weeds is sick, disgusting and especially nausea-causing if uttered by the Hitlerjunge Ratzinger in Germany.
    Because weed needs to be eliminated, just like the last time rats needed to be eliminated. Only that in both cases it’s human beings.

    What I found cunningly clever was a letter to the editor in the regional newspaper dealing with the boycott of his speech in the Bundestag:
    The writer, a former MdB said that although he would probably have stayed there to listen, he can understand the position of those who didn’t because it was a one-way stream and never intended as a dialogue. He criticised that those people get attacked because they won’t listen to the pope but favour talking to the Taliban about peace.
    The writer finished “Talking about peace is a good thing. But who’d ever assume that talking to the pope and talking to the Taliban would be equal in terms of possible outcomes”.
    I’m pretty sure the god-botherers don’t get it.

  401. Brother Ogvorbis, Hominy Lovin' Hominid! says

    OMG I just got a ticket for driving with no insurance.

    I fuking hate being poor and all this shit. Sorry, sorry, I should have had insurance. But it’s hard to afford on unemployment. Fuck me.

    Yet another example of ‘being poor is more expensive than being rich.’ That sucks.

  402. Sili says

    Never love someone who doesn’t deserve you.

    Bollocks. “Never love someone you don’t deserve” is a little closer, but I’m sure there’s fault with that as well.

  403. hockeymonkey says

    Hi TET…first time/long time.

    The abortion posts/comments over the last few months have inspired me to volunteer at PP. Thank you all for your stories and thoughtful arguments! They do make a difference. My problem: I can’t get my local clinic to call me back. I’ve tried applying through the web and leaving phone messages with the volunteer coordinator. No luck, and it’s been several months.

    Anyone have any advice? I’m in Pittsburgh, PA. Maybe I just need to go down to the clinic in person?

  404. says

    I need some help arguing with a Godbot.

    Benjamin Geiger said, “One difference Linda. Yahweh is not the same god as Allah. Yahweh is Shaitan in disguise. There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.”

    Straw-man fallacy occurs in the following pattern of argument:
    1.Person A has position X.( YHVH is the ONLY true God.)

    2.Person B disregards certain key points of X .. (YHVH is the ONLY true God.) (Knowing that Linda equates Jesus Christ with God and considers the god of Islam(Allah) as a false god)
    and instead presents the superficially similar position Y(Yahweh is Shaitan in disguise(another way of saying that the God of the Bible is false). There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.”)Knowing that in Islam Jesus is compared to Muhammad as being a prophet.
    Thus, Y is a resulting distorted version of X. This can be said because Position X is actually a true statement in regards of absolute truth and person B is trying to distort that truth with the relative position Y

    You know the Christian position on God the Father, Son (being also considered a prophet), and Holy Spirit. You supplement that with a similar yet superficial position of the Islamic false god and his prophet. This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious, because attacking a distorted version of a position fails to constitute an attack on the actual position. You must prove Lindas statement ,“YHVH is the ONLY true God”, is false. But you don’t, you just reword her position with your own and use that as your argument as a defense thus creating a straw-man fallacy. How do you attack a distorted version of a position? Simple, you attacked your own quote, “Yahweh is Shaitan in disguise. There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet” with your comment, “See, that works just the same coming from them, too.”

    I’ve tried explaining what a straw man argument is, but he doesn’t listen. He just uses the term as an incantation and expects me to roll over and concede.

  405. David Marjanović, OM says

    Not caught up.

    Watching documentary about lies in politics. First item: the Donation of Constantine.

    The practise of letting people fail and then repeat doesn’t ever ask why they failed in the first place.

    True.

    placing them into a new group where they’ll be immediately branded as “the stupid one who didn’t make it the last time”

    Teachers think that way of students, which is bad enough.

    Students don’t.

    Nobody is ever supposed to write in a situation students are supposed to write in when completing a dictation: remembering what the teacher said, writing it down correctly the first time while probably already listening to what the teacher is saying again. Nobody, not even secretaries in the good old pre-tape-recorder times were supposed to do that.

    *lightbulb moment* Thanks!

    I once ran into the word “Feuilleton” in a dictation in third grade

    *slow-motion headdesk with sound of crashing plane in the background*

    On behalf of my normal mortal classmates, I deeply appreciate the Mercy of Late Birth.

    Hmpf, I can’t help to notice that they simply have a huge “feel good” factor. Suckling is one of our first pleasurable experiences, after all. Using the typical method of parents all over the world to quickly clean a pacifier when outside which is to use your own mouth, I discovered that it always takes a bit of willpower to stop and hand it back…

    Interesting. I’ll have to test this, provided someone gives me an opportunity. I’m pretty sure I’d only enjoy chewing around on a (hollow silicone) rubber. Fine motorics of the jaw tips… pressure on the jaw joints…

    Oh, wait. I’d certainly enjoy the shield of the pacifier hugging my lips-in-the-wide-sense. ^_^ And maybe I’d also enjoy looking overloadingly cute.

    Being the oldest of 4, I remember handling pacifiers a lot, but I’m not sure if I remember having one in my own mouth.

    Democracy is truely evil, it get’s people to expect it everywhere…

    Vox populi, vox dei !!

    (How old is that claim, BTW? Does anyone know?)

    But I couldn’t help noticing the hipocrysy of those thousands and thousands of fanboys and girls cheering the pope:
    Tomorrow, they will still use contraception while having sex with their partner. They will still probably donate money for organisations that provide real healthcare and family planning in Africa. In short, they disagree with him on almost every issue, but still they cheer him on, spend time and money to see him.
    That’s like taking two days off and spending 200€ on a trip to a concert of a band that usually makes me turn off the radio.

    Well, they just disagree with him on this one issue. (And another 5 that never come up in daily secular life or even in church, and another 50,000 they have no clue even exist.)

    weeds amongst the wheat

    Damn close to instant Godwin.

    “Talking about peace is a good thing. But who’d ever assume that talking to the pope and talking to the Taliban would be equal in terms of possible outcomes”

    Heh.

    I saw this comment on YT :

    Has anyone with an IQ above 80 ever commented on YouTube?

    Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

  406. says

    Oh, and this is just brilliant.

    The story’s headline: “Study: Vaccinations for Whooping Cough Fade After Three Years”.

    I suggest giving the pertussis vaccine as a yearly routine injection, the way flu vaccines are given.

    Idiot posts a link to a story containing situations when people caught pertussis despite supposedly being vaccinated… never mind that the vaccinations are more than three years old. So, obviously, he didn’t bother reading the article and just spouted his anti-vaxxer nonsense.

  407. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Dang, one of my external hard drives is dying. I have a back-up (made yesterday) of the data partition, but the other partition is the time machine back up files. Not critical, but handy. I’m trying the freezer trick, but it appears that one also needs to keep hard drive cold while using the drive, as it fails again when it warms up. And the time machine partition has >200 GB. I have a couple of days to plan how to do this as the replacement drive won’t arrive until Tuesday.

  408. pelamun says

    DM,

    Not caught up.

    There’s still that issue re Austria and its role in the HRE waiting for you ;)

  409. says

    Nerd:

    Maybe you could wrap the drive in a plastic bag and surround it with ice? Maybe keep it in an insulated bag? (The only issue I’d worry about is airflow, and I’m not certain whether a drive needs airflow for any reason other than temperature…)

  410. pelamun says

    Vox populi, vox dei !!

    (How old is that claim, BTW? Does anyone know?)

    I don’t, but the Pffft of All Knowledge (TM) does:

    Often quoted as, Vox populi, vox dei (/ˌvɒks ˈpɒpjuːlaɪ ˌvɒks ˈdiːaɪ/), “The voice of the people [is] the voice of God”, is an old proverb often erroneously attributed to William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century.
    Another early reference to the expression is in a letter from Alcuin to Charlemagne in 798, although it is believed to have been in earlier use. The full quotation from Alcuin reads:

    Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.

    English translation:

    And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

    The usage indicates that the phrase had long since become an aphorism of common political wisdom by Alcuin and Charlemagne’s time.

  412. Antiochus Epiphanes says

    KG, Rorschach: My knowledge of immunology is ~15 years old+Pffft, but I have read about helminth treatment for allergies. IIRC, the IgE response is responsible for recruiting eosiniophils/basiophils that cause allergic symptoms AND is implicated in responding to eukaryotic pathogens.

    My gut has been filmed more often than Steve Buscemi, and we can rule out anything macro. The problem with tropical micro-parasites is that often know very little about their phenology—in short not enough information exists about them to know when to look and what we are looking for.

    TMI: For the most part, my symptoms are sprue-like: sporadic malabsorption with accompanying and sometime intense lower abdominal pain, and continual increased eosinophil levels concentrated especially in the esophagus (even though strangely enough, I suffer none of the symptoms of eosinophilic esophagitis or GERD). The sporadic symptoms last days to months, and over the last three years have occurred in an identical cycle. The last time I had it bad, it seemed to be cured by a round of turista that I got in Mexico. The symptoms (which I had been suffering from for 3 months) disappeared in 24 awful hours.

    Anyway, I have decided that it is easy enough to live with for now. Next year I will be in Brazil, and I’m going to take some time and check myself into the university hospital in Rio for a thorough assessment by someone knowledgeable in tropical disease.

  414. pelamun says

    Giliell, 401:

    I just hope that widespread disappointment about the papal visit (like the pope saying he wants to reunite with the Orthodox Church but not mentioning the Protestants) will contribute to the demise of the Catholic Church in Germany and beyond that in Europe. I think Wojtyła just had a better image, because he was given to making the occasional grand gesture, something Ratzinger seems to lack.

    Rawnaeris, 412:

    is there any other way than refreshing your browser window (which still works)? I’m asking because I’ve been looking for a good way of keeping track of comments on Pharyngula that doesn’t involve having a large number of windows open in your browser and trying to remember until what comment you had read it. Instapaper unfortunately cuts off the comments when saving the article. Does Readitlater preseve them?

  416. says

    Benjamin: Idiot posts a link to a story containing situations when people caught pertussis despite supposedly being vaccinated… never mind that the vaccinations are more than three years old.

    Those damn vaccinations! Just like Chinese food!

    So where’s the CEO? Can’t find Twisty either. No, the other Twisty, not the occasional commenter here. The one who lives in Texas where the fires are burning. Which is pretty much what they do, eh.

    I got my fret on this AM.

    Joe caught a nasty cold, probably at that damned bad-news conference I still haven’t written my notes up on*, and if I catch it from him I’ll have to miss both my shots AND my massage this week, and my massage guy’s been on vacation for the last two weeks and my back is whining loudly and my knees are starting to grumble too.

    Joe’s boss at the newsletter just quit, which means it’s almost certain her boss will take the opportunity to pull the plug on it and there goes the closest thing to a steady gig in this household. OTOH maybe the reduction in aggravation will be worth it. Pity to lose that nice fact-based publication though; the audience was small but useful: field scientists and policymakers.

    *yeah, parse that

    Plus here’s the damned shingles/post-herpetic neuropathy again and that depression thing. Two solid days of low fog here. Bleh.

    And hey, I’m still better off than lots. I got health insurance and a partner who knows how to yell at the Blue Wall for results. I have been following people’s stories here and wincing and cheering by turns.

    Speaking of: Is everyone here aware of the Annual Dysfunctional Families Thread over on Making Light? It’s running now.

    As long as I’m palely imitating DDMFM: IIRC, my mother started using pacifiers (“foolers” or as I called ’em “plugs” as in “Somebody go plug the baby”) somewhere around the fourth kid. Love ’em. I don’t think anybody got an overbite, and don’t remember any problems with giving them up. I’m sure there were Opinions but those got ignored, as one learns to after the fourth, fifth, sixth kid.

    I myself, the oldest, was breastfed, on a strict four-hour schedule, as was the fashion/best advice in 1949. No one else got breastfed, IIRC. I have the worst and broadest allergies of the lot. Doesn’t mean much except, as we all know, statistics don’t apply well to individuals.

  417. says

    Last Tuesday, Rick Perry was stupid again.

    … Rick Perry went to New York, stood with Jewish leaders, and declared his support for Israel. He called it a democracy, a bulwark against terrorism, and a stalwart ally of the United States.
    Then he was asked: “To what extent do you view America’s continued protection of Israel as a theological priority?” He answered:
    Well, obviously, Israel is our oldest and most stable democratic ally in that region. That is what this is about. I also as a Christian have a clear directive to support Israel. So from my perspective, it’s pretty easy. Both as an American and as a Christian, I am going to stand with Israel.

    Whoa. That’s something George W. Bush never did. Bush never said he had a Christian duty to stand with Israel, because to say such a thing would have been stupid and dangerous. By framing U.S. foreign policy in terms of a religious alliance between Christians and Jews, Perry is validating the propaganda of Islamic extremists. He’s jeopardizing peace, Israel, and the United States….

    …Bush affirmed: “If you’re a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim, you’re equally American.”…

    So, Rick Perry is doing the crusader, alliance for Christ, bit all too well.
    http://www.slate.com/id/2304311/

  418. starstuff91 says

    Last Tuesday, Rick Perry was stupid again.

    I just assume he’s always being stupid. It’d be news to me if he did something intelligent.

  419. says

    Last Friday the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary proved that he is still narrow-minded and dull of wit.

    …one influential religious leader appears to have been unphased by the global uproar over Davis’ death and critical examinations of the death penalty. Mohler argued in a Sept. 22 podcast that the death penalty is actually pro-life in a way, because it is intended to “affirm the value [and] sanctity of every single human life“:
    …according to the Bible, capital punishment is pro-life. “The death penalty is not about retribution,” Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in a podcast Sept. 22. “It is first of all about underlining the importance of every single human life.”

    Mohler, who has a Ph.D. in theology, said in Genesis 9, where capital punishment is mandated for murder, “it is precisely because the taking of one human life by another means that the murderer has effectively, morally and theologically, forfeited his own right to live.”…
    Mohler is an influential figure in Baptist circles in the United State. As he notes on his website, he is president of the “flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world” and is a board member of the right-wing Focus on the Family….

    Source

  420. says

    Last Saturday mormons were dense with stupidity at a conference about SSA. “SSA” is what they call homosexuality. It stand for Same Sex Attraction, and they use that designation to make it sound like a disease.

    Mormons with same-sex attraction can find peace by focusing on Jesus Christ and his atonement, an LDS Church general authority told a conference on Saturday…

    “Through the infinite and eternal atonement, we can be reconciled and sit comfortably in peace by [the] side of Christ and Heavenly Father,” said Elder Jay E. Jensen, of the church’s Presidency of the Seventy.

    He spoke at the 21st annual conference of Evergreen International, which describes itself as “the same-sex voice of faithful” LDS members. The one-day conference, in the church’s Joseph Smith Memorial Building in Salt Lake City, focused on resources to help members who struggle with same-sex attraction.

    “There is hope and there is healing” for everyone — not just those with same-sex attraction — through the atonement, Jensen told the opening session. He said an example is shown through experiences shared with the group by a man introduced only as “Spencer.”

    Spencer said he was close to suicide in the past year as he struggled with same-sex attraction in a church that says homosexual acts, but not the attraction itself, are a sin.

    Spencer said as he sought God, he found that “same-sex attraction is just a trial that God allows us to experience for whatever reason. We can sit and question our whole lives why … but this is a great opportunity for us to learn to grow to become the man that God sent us here to become…

    He said those who try to follow Christ will find that he “encircles in the arms of safety” and will help them find peace and joy, and escape despair….

    —————–

    Last Tuesday, Rick Perry was stupid again.

    I just assume he’s always being stupid. It’d be news to me if he did something intelligent.

    Yep. That was my intention, to imply that. If it’s Tuesday, Rick Perry is stupid. If it’s Saturday, mormons are bashing gays. If it’s Friday, Baptists are playing twister with the meaning of pro-life. Every fucking day of every fucking week they are all displaying, proudly, the inability of think—along with an alarming capacity for intolerance.

    —————
    From the readers comments about the SSA story in the Salt Lake Tribune:

    Congrats Tribscum, you managed to get your anti-LDS and pro-gay weekly individual stories into the same story! Glad to see some work is being put into becoming more efficient.

    The Trib needs to create two new “sections,” one called “All Gay All Day” and another “Illegal Immigration Propaganda.” That way, they could say the same thing 365 days a year without infecting the rest of the paper.

    Sin is sin.

    Um, one point you seem to conveniently overlook. Joseph Smith obeyed God’s law of marrying members of the opposite sex. Can you point out a single precedent of God condoning same-sex marriage? Didn’t think so. There’s an answer there, if you’re bright enough to perceive it.

  421. says

    *sigh*
    I think my neighbour will soon need to be under supervision 24/7. When we moved in here 4 years ago she explained us our ways around here. Today she rang at my door, again, to ask how, since she wants to go outside a bit for the first time (again), she’s going to get back into the house.
    Somehow I stuck to her memory, which is amazing enough, but she’s always amazed to see that I have children. :(

    John Morales
    Notapology totally not necessary. We’re adults, we can deal with such things. Disagreement is food for thought. I think what we both did wrong was to go on about it, even shortly, at the Troy Davis thread.

    David M.

    Teachers think that way of students, which is bad enough.

    Students don’t.

    Unfortunately, they do. Especially in a world where “success” has become the only thing that matters.
    But the stigmatization of children in school (especially through teachers) is a big problem. It speaks volumes when teachers say that “Kevin and Justin aren’t names as much as a diagnosis”

    pelamun
    Well, they are already mightily disappointed with Razzi. His visit can’t hide that they are in deep troubles (three cheers for that, big boo as for the reasons).
    His visit will have disappointed them even more, there was nothing that would re-kindle the fire of luke-warm catholics.
    If people could just get rid of this “oh, but I really want the big white wedding and the christening” idea.

    Ben Geiger
    Oh, anti-vaxxers, some of the most stupid and most harmful people on this planet.
    So, science finds out that a vaccine is less effective than we believed (but still works the way we thought it would), it proves that vaccines don’t work, somehow..

  424. says

    Antiochus epiphanes, a friend was cured of years-long queasy stomach and later ulcers by a violent round of food-poisoning. He thinks he got rid of some gut bacterium that was causing the problem. Taking a shotgun approach, have you ever tried one of those antibiotics that kills all your gut flora and then re-populating by eating lots of fresh yogourt?

  426. says

    In good news out of the Morridor, Moab, Utah is hosting its first-ever gay pride festival.

    Of course, some Utahans object:

    Another attempt for lost persons in a plague of mankind to, attempt once more, to be accepted.

    Pride in your sexual proclivity? Messed up.

    Festivals for a dead end lifestyle.

    Shame on Moab, there is nothing to be proud of in being a Sodomite.

    Why does this have to be news, other than to push their agenda.

  427. pelamun says

    Giliell,

    that is a problem. I hope my “nephew-son” can avoid the fate of being sent to Protestant Sunday school, at least one of his moms used to be a committed (pan-)deist for whom the question of religious education for her kids was an important idea (don’t ask me how that squares with Protestant Sunday school). Well the little guy is a little over a year, I’ll just hope it won’t be a problem in a dozen years…

    if you want a Christian wedding, just book a wedding in Japan, incl. a fake Christian priest, hehe…

  428. pelamun says

    Just to add to my last post: so around where my nephew-son is growing up, it has been customary to baptise kids and from around 12-13 y.o. send them to Sunday school (including church attendance of course, for a year or so), and at 14 y.o. they undergo this “confirmation” ceremony, upon which they are showered with presents, usually of a pecuniary nature, the going rate nowadays might be $100-$200 per invited guest.
    Many then stop going to church after that and leave it when they get their first job in order to avoid paying church tax.

    But you know, traditions are traditions…

  429. Sili says

    Question about Jon Stewart:

    When he welcomes a man to his show, he stands up, practically clicks his heels and yells “Sah!”.

    But I’ve never noticed him say “Ma’am” when greeting a woman.

    Thoughts?

  430. says

    pelamun
    Hihi, the church one of my best friend works for as a sexton (she’s an atheist, btw) has reduced the “Konfirmatenunterricht” to once a month.
    If you want the celebration and the gifts, just go for a “Jugendweihe”, which is a long-standing secular tradition to mark the point when you cease to be a child and start being an adult.
    It was really nice. My Lutheran friends were pretty jealous of me: I got all the ups and none of the downs.

    I’m glad my husband left the church long before we got married. He a bit of “feel-good spiritualist” who thinks that “there has to be something beyond our lives”. Don’t ask me. But we both at least agree that the churches are bullshit.

    Sin is sin.

    “They’re against it, aren’t they?”

  431. says

    Benjamin Geiger – – germs are there to provide a service. If your internal terrain is toxic and riddled with dead cells, these germs are God’s invention to go in and CLEAN UP. It’s just like when a dead animal is on the ground, there are creatures that CLEAN IT UP. If you have healthy cells and are not toxic internally, these germs have no host. And if you DO need a cleaning, you had better allow it to run its course or you can DIE if you stifle the cleansing with synthetic drugs/vaccines. Just because you MASK symptoms doesn’t mean you are healthy. It’s akin to destroying the gauges on your dash board which are telling you that you are low on oil. There are consequences to eating a poor diet. Bad behavior has bad consequences. Vaccines and drugs have not and will not bail us out regarding that law.

    …

  432. ChasCPeterson says

    In good news out of the Morridor, Moab, Utah is hosting its first-ever gay pride festival.

    Well, Moab.
    Not exactly your typical Utahan hamlet.
    More sort of the Mountainbikidor.

  433. says

    Shame on Moab, there is nothing to be proud of in being a Sodomite.

    There is nothing to be proud of in being a homophobe or Mormon, in my opinion. But Sodom’s sins were more like the Tea Party anyways.

  434. Sili says

    Jebus Christ!

    Rick Perry’s new action hero campaign video uses a separate font to make small words stand out.

    Guess what they’ve used to highlight the “A” in “A president”?

    Why, yes! Indeed, it is the same one as the big, red Atheist A over there ->

    Someone please tell Rachel Maddow.

  435. Part-Time Insomniac, Zombie Porcupine Nox Arcana Fan says

    Re: 432 – Yeah, I share the “…”
    ——————————-

    Just saw a commercial for those broccoli-and-cheese stuffed chicken breasts. My parents would always buy them in the frozen food section for me when I was little. I loved them, I would have eaten them every day if I’d be able to. The commercial did make me wonder if there was a recipe for making your own at home.

    Let’s just say that the more recipes I find that let me make things I used to enjoy as a kid, the more I’m thinking, “I am SO going to make my own food and freeze it for during the week/month once I get my own place.”
    ——————————–

    Re: Gay Pride in Moab –

    Buncha killjoys. Well, if YOU won’t accept them and love them, just what the bloody hell did you think was going to happen? Mass suicide, perhaps?
    ———————————-

    Kids as diagnosis: I might have mentioned him before, but he’s simply the case that sticks out most in my mind (I wasn’t even in the school when was around).

    We’ll call this boy M. He had a horrible home life, I can only guess he saw some super-twisted shit happen between his parents (I shudder to think they may have involved him directly). His behavior at school wasa clear indication of this, but to the best of my knowledge, he was never taken from his home, maybe because people were afraid of what his parents would do. The weird part was that whenever he played house with the girls in his class at recess, he was like a fairytale prince: loving, generous, and patient. I keep wondering if maybe he knew on some level that life didn’t have to be as he knew it, and playtime was the only time he felt safe in acting out a part in such a life.

    Anyway, upshot of it all, whenever a student seems to be promising a whirlwind of trouble for the year, those who knew M would say, “I hope he won’t be another M. Once was enough.” It sucks when the only legacy a kid has in school is as an example of what can go wrong, and then gets applied to whoever comes in.

  436. starstuff91 says

    @ Sili
    I saw that. It’s amazing. Someone who made that video must have noticed. It’s too funny.

  437. Algernon says

    It’s just like when a dead animal is on the ground, there are creatures that CLEAN IT UP.

    e.Coli lolcats?

    IM UP IN UR KIDNEYS, NATURALLY SELECTING!

  438. Mattir says

    Interesting story from National Geographic about a 400CE Mayan tomb.

    Unfortunately, I was sent the link to the freerepublic thread discussing the article. With an email reading, in its entirety, as follows:

    people are just not warm and fuzzy, and we’re all sinners. Not just white males.

    Yes, my brother, who has refused to speak to me for several years because he is offended by my imagined hatred for white males has resurfaced. I hadn’t realized that he was a freeper, though. Sigh.

  439. First Approximation, Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All says

    Sigh… remember when the crowd at the previous Republican debates cheered Perry executing 200+ people and the idea of letting a 30 year old without health insurance die? This time they actually booed a gay solider that submitted a question:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8pcJ6Hh4Y0

    None of the candidates reprimanded the crowd. These are the people that “support the troops”?

    WARNING: Video contains Santorum, the ugly kind (i.e, the former Senator).

  440. starstuff91 says

    I love the state I live in. Florida is beautiful and has a lot of great people. But sometimes it tries really hard to make me hate it. Like when Herman Cain took the lead in the recent Florida Straw Poll.

  441. Invisible Dragon says

    “”Pride in your sexual proclivity? Messed up.””

    Wait, what?

    I thought that was the reason for Mormons having all those kids on display – to take pride in their sexual proclivities. As in, breeding…

    I don’t understand… Why wouldn’t gays and lesbians do the same? /snark

    O_O

  442. chigau () says

    Benjamin “Walter Waldowski” Geiger
    re GERMS
    I guess you’re screwed.
    We’re all screwed.
    Except the germs.

  443. First Approximation, Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All says

    Unfortunately, I was sent the link to the freerepublic thread discussing the article.

    And the comments are just as racists as expected.

  444. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Benjamin, thanks for your suggestion about the hard drive, which was along with my thinking. I do have a USB “Swiss Army Knife” hard drive widget (2.5″ ATA, 3.5″ ATA, and SATA), with a similar power supply. So it should be easy to put the problem drive in a small lunch/soda cooler, and pack with bagged ice/blue ice to maintain the chill for a while.

    I since confirmed the backup drive for the data partition is also having problems mounting, so I am backing that up, and hope it holds out for another hour and a half to complete the transfer. Otherwise, I would have to do the freezer trick for both partitions.

  445. chigau () says

    Wow.
    My current episode of sourdough raised the loaves in about 20 minutes.
    I think I’ll sleep with the lights on tonight.

  446. The Lone Coyote says

    RIP Jim Henson. I like the pure emotion in this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrZyMptC2eQ&feature=related

    The muppets have always ‘felt’ real to me. Intellectually of course I know they’re just foam and felt and plastic eyes, but they read as real characters.

    And so in that sense it’s almost like little parts of Jim’s soul are still around, living on in the characters he created.

  449. says

    Wow, you could see and hear the speaker’s disgust and contempt at people running around in their undies.

    Fox 13 News is a mormon-owned TV station, so they are, naturally, disgusted my almost everything related to the human body.

  450. says

    College-age Republicans prove once again that they have a tin ear when it comes to humor. And as far as combining humor with their political statements …. OUCH.

    Campus Republicans at the University of California Berkeley have cooked up a storm of controversy with their plans for a bake sale….They’ve developed a sliding scale where the price of the cookie or brownie depends on your gender and the color of your skin.
    During the sale, scheduled for Tuesday, baked goods will be sold to white men for $2.00, Asian men for $1.50, Latino men for $1.00, black men for $0.75 and Native American men for $0.25. All women will get $0.25 off those prices.
    “The pricing structure is … really there to cause people to think more critically about what this kind of policy would do in university admissions.”
    Lewis says it’s a way to make a statement about pending legislation that would let the California universities consider race or national origin during the admission process…
    Tim Wise, author of the book “White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son,” calls the bake sale a “sarcastic and rather smarmy slap at people of color.”…
    “I get the joke,” he continued. “How very original. It’s been done for 15 years. The point that I think needs to be made … is that by the time anyone steps on a college campus … there has already been 12- to 13-years of institutionalized affirmative action for white folks, that is to say, racially embedded inequality, which has benefited those of us who are white. And it’s only at the point of college admissions that these folks seem to get concerned with color consciousness.”
    Lewis insists, however, that Campus Republicans will go ahead with their bake sale and are committed to their controversial pricing structure.

    http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/25/us/california-racial-bake-sale/index.html

  451. Rey Fox says

    From the underwear comments:

    So then, gay rights is not about being equal, its about sex. You want support, stop being stupid and running around in your undie’s. Grow up.

    If that’s growing up, then I’ll happily stay forever young. Also, I can imagine the response being “It’s not about sex!” but well, it’s partly about sex, isn’t it? And so what if it is? What’s more “grown up” than sex? Obviously this event didn’t remove all the asshole sticks in Utah.

    I didn’t watch the video since I pretty much boycott all TV news, but I was rather disappointed that the men all seemed to come in boxers. Come on guys. I got stuff in my underwear drawer that would really scandalize the Beehive State.

  452. starstuff91 says

    @ Lynna
    College republicans always piss me off. They’re so totally completely oblivious to how the world is for someone who’s not a middle class white christian male, it blows my mind.
    Like the College Republicans at my university. They had a lot of new chalkings lately. One said: “How’s that ObamaCare Working for ya?” So I hunted down some chalk and wrote: “Pretty well. Now I’m covered under my parents health insurance plan throughout college”. They’re so oblivious that they hate something that actually benefits them.

  455. starstuff91 says

    @ Benjamin

    That kind of hate is unfortunately common :(
    The Freethinkers group I’m in hasn’t done any chalkings since I’ve been part of it. I can imagine that they’d be vandalize. I’m still going to try to convince the president to do it though :p

  457. says

    Re Lynna and the UC Berkeley bake sale:

    College republicans annoy me the most because their privilege is so obvious. The mere fact that they can get into a top tier university so easily while their ethnic peers struggle is a privilege, but they are incapable of seeing that. (That and they tend to embody the worse of the college stereotypes).

  458. says

    starstuff91:

    Oh yeah, any Freethinkers or Atheist Student Alliance chalkings get vandalized within hours.

    I’m tempted to set up some sort of surveillance camera to catch the fucknuggets responsible, since erasing someone else’s chalking is a violation of the student honor code.

  459. David Marjanović, OM says

    We’re still awash in apples from the garden (and haven’t even started plucking any yet). So, Sister 1 makes apple juice. Among other things, this produces a foamy mess. Sister complains; brother remarks “so you want to drink apple juice, but you don’t want to see how it’s made !!”

    Later: Sister 1 confirms – “such a mess, we might just as well slaughter a pig!”

    There’s still that issue re Austria and its role in the HRE waiting for you ;)

    I know. I saw it, admitted to myself that I was way too ill & tired to do anything about it, and went to bed. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe.

    I don’t, but the Pffft of All Knowledge (TM) does:

    Oh. Thanks. :-]

    I think Wojtyła just had a better image, because he was given to making the occasional grand gesture, something Ratzinger seems to lack.

    And because his very first sermon as pope was titled “Don’t be afraid”, while Ratzinger’s can be summarized as “be afraid, be very afraid”. Oh, and, because Wojtyła (like Raygun) has single-handedly defeated communism.

    Last Tuesday, Rick Perry was stupid again.

    I like this so much I read it aloud to my brother. He laughed, asked if a bike was just stolen in Beijing, and then, after a pause, asked what Perry had said this time.

    Teachers think that way of students, which is bad enough.

    Students don’t.

    Unfortunately, they do.

    Is that so in Germany??? If so, color me culture-shocked. The younger sister only got out a year and a half ago. When people get too good marks and are male, they get charged with being brainers and sentenced to being bullied – because it must be punished that they care more about anything than about, like, sports, music, being cool, and the rest of conformism. Nobody cares about bad grades. This goes so far that I’ve never heard of even a convicted brainer being accused of “so you think you’re better than us”; it’s really taken for granted that nobody believes good grades are better.

    But the stigmatization of children in school (especially through teachers) is a big problem. It speaks volumes when teachers say that “Kevin and Justin aren’t names as much as a diagnosis”

    Well, it is a problem when teachers confuse children with their parents.

    if you want a Christian wedding, just book a wedding in Japan, incl. a fake Christian priest, hehe…

    X-)

    But I’ve never noticed him say “Ma’am” when greeting a woman.

    Thoughts?

    Starfleet protocol?

    Never mind.

    Jugendweihe

    Sounds creepy.

    a long-standing secular tradition

    Then why is it called “consecration” (Weihe)?

    Vaccines and drugs have not and will not bail us out regarding that law.

    Sing it, Benjamin. Sing it:

    Jesus gives the children acne.
    AIDS and leprosy galore.
    Germs and worms of every kind.
    Things to make the children blind.
    But he cannot give them smallpox anymore.

    Scientists and unbelievers
    wiped the pox right off the earth.
    Jesus still gives gifts to kids,
    broken nose and burnt eyelids.
    But he cannot give them smallpox anymore.

    Source: somewhere in a Pharyngula comment on or before Oct. 18th, 2009.

    When you’re done with singing, mention polio. And rinderpest.

    Guess what they’ve used to highlight the “A” in “A president”?

    Why, yes! Indeed, it is the same one as the big, red Atheist A over there ->

    Full of win.

    Yes, my brother, who has refused to speak to me for several years because he is offended by my imagined hatred for white males has resurfaced. I hadn’t realized that he was a freeper, though. Sigh.

    *pounce* *hug*

    *herbal tea with red clover*

    WARNING: Video contains Santorum, the ugly kind (i.e, the former Senator).

    Full of win.

    Wow, you could see and hear the speaker’s disgust and contempt at people running around in their undies.

    Quite the experience.

    Really if they hadn’t told people in advance you couldn’t tell their undies from bechwear…

    You’ve completely missed the point. The point is that, as stated in comment 457, they’re not wearing Mormon garments. Had they worn holy underwear, everything would have been wonderful !!

    erasing someone else’s chalking is a violation of the student honor code

    What is a chalking? And what exactly is an honor code?

  460. starstuff91 says

    What is a chalking? And what exactly is an honor code?

    Chalking is what student groups do to advertise on college campuses. They just write things in chalk on the sidewalks. An honor code is just a list of behaviors that is unacceptable for students of a university to do.

  461. David Marjanović, OM says

    Later: Sister 1 confirms – “such a mess, we might just as well slaughter a pig!”

    …where “mess” is not a perfect translation, because it fails to put the sow in Sauerei. I don’t know if the pun was intended, though.

  462. Dianne says

    I live in a city with some lovely bike paths. Lovely, that is, on every day except Sunday when they’re full of cars and SUVs. This puzzled me for many weeks and in fact I even called the cops to tell them about this ticket bonanza. Then I found out what was going on: it’s legal for a car to park in the bike lane if the occupants are going to church. What do people think: On a scale of 1 to 10, how big a waste of time would campaigning to get this law changed be?

  463. Ibis3, féministe avec un titre française de fantaisie says

    Sometimes I just have to come back here and breathe a sigh of relief that you’re all who you are. I get so frustrated at the commenters on other sites (this time The Friendly Atheist).

    Anyway, thanks Pharyngulites.

  465. Katrina, radicales féministes athées says

          Drive-by post to ask for, well, links I guess.

          One of my meatspace friends has a son who had been living with his girlfriend in Utah. She has a daughter and they have had a son together. Last summer, he came back to his parents’ house in Oregon with their son for a visit and has been in Oregon ever since.

          It appears the girlfriend has some serious issues. Since he came back she’s been calling and harassing he and his parents, she’s called the police in the middle of the night to do a “welfare” check on her son. She keeps threatening to come out – with the police – and take the child back, while it’s likely that she’s been hurting the daughter in the meantime.

          My friend and her son have been documenting everything, but things are coming to a head and she’s asking me if I know any advocacy group that could help them out. I don’t know of any, so I’m hoping for suggestions to pass on.

  466. says

    DrDMFM:

    “Jesus gives the children acne.
    AIDS and leprosy galore.
    Germs and worms of every kind.
    Things to make the children blind.

    But he cannot give them smallpox anymore.

    Scientists and unbelievers
    wiped the pox right off the earth.
    Jesus still gives gifts to kids,
    broken nose and burnt eyelids.

    But he cannot give them smallpox anymore.”

    Stolen.

  467. ImaginesABeach says

    Dianne –

    Does this happen only near churches? Is it permissible near a mosque or synagogue? And if so, is it only permissible near a mosque or synagogue on Sundays?

  468. starstuff91 says

    @ Dianne:
    (If you’re in the US) You should tell them that that’s unconstitutional. (If you’re not in the US) Wat?

    Sometimes I just have to come back here and breathe a sigh of relief that you’re all who you are. I get so frustrated at the commenters on other sites (this time The Friendly Atheist).

    What happened over there?

  469. starstuff91 says

    I just finished my first batch of cold brewed sweet tea. It’s pretty good, but not quite strong enough. Next time I’ll have to do it for two days (instead of one) and maybe add an extra tea bag.

  471. Dianne says

    They had a lot of new chalkings lately. One said: “How’s that ObamaCare Working for ya?” So I hunted down some chalk and wrote: “Pretty well.

    Glad it’s working out for you, but I’ve got to confess I have real problems with “Obamacare”. Actually, one problem with numerous facets. Namely, it left health insurance companies’ executives alive and I’ve come to the conclusion that CEOs and other top execs of “health maintenance” or “health insurance” organizations need to be first, not second, but first against the wall when the revolution comes. Tobacco company executives will just have to wait their turn.

    Disclaimer: All acts of violence should be metaphorical and while I wish death on the current business model of private health insurance, I wish no actual homo sapiens ill, no matter how deeply involved they are in immoral withholding of health care for profit.

    Meta-disclaimer: Why do I feel the need to add the disclaimer?

  472. starstuff91 says

    You could also try the stuff that’s meant to be cold-brewed. In lukewarm water, it tends to brew to my strength (and I like my tea strong) in 5-10 minutes.

    I’m trying cold brewing this time because it’s supposed to reduce the bitterness (it doesn’t bother me, but my boyfriend doesn’t like it). Next time I buy tea I’m probably going to try loose leaf tea which might produce stronger tea.

  473. kristinc says

    Starstuff, in my experience a longer brewing time tends to make the tea bitter. (I forgot green tea for two days once and it was completely undrinkable.) More teabags are the way to go if you want it stronger.

  474. Dianne says

    @468: Having only heard about the law from hearsay and not actually read the text, I can’t say for sure. Though I’ve noticed no unusual concentration of cars in bike lanes on Friday or Saturday so I’m guessing that it’s not usual for synagogues or mosques to take advantage of this

    @469: I’m in the US. And of course it’s unconstitutional. But is the probability of getting anyone to do anything about it measurably greater than zero?

  475. starstuff91 says

    @ Dianne:

    I know how you feel. I’d have liked it to go a lot farther than it did (socialized medicine sounds great to me!), but that’s not the complaint that the College Republicans had (as you probably know). I’m just happy that I won’t have to fend for myself in the health insurance market when I turn 21.

  476. kristinc says

    Mr Kristin brought 5 lbs of black plums on sale, and they’re getting elderly, so I’ve cut some up and they’re simmering with a little sugar in an attempt to make something plum-preserve-y. I’ve made plum jam once years ago and found the appearance and texture to be unappetizing (although I did use low-sugar pectin so maybe that was it), so I hope this time I end up with something that looks tasty on my English muffins.

  477. starstuff91 says

    I’m in the US. And of course it’s unconstitutional. But is the probability of getting anyone to do anything about it measurably greater than zero?

    I don’t know. Maybe there’s a atheist group who’d be willing to take up the cause.

  478. chigau () says

    ImaginesABeach
    I think the time-tag thing is deliberate.
    I was -7 UTC.
    Now I am -6 PharyngulaTime.

  480. Ibis3, féministe avec un titre française de fantaisie says

    @starstuff:

    What happened over there?

    A bunch of people saying how stupid and irrelevant “Elevatorgate” was (coupled with defences of Dawkins on the issue). An ass who has no qualms about supporting the death penalty despite evidence of the problems with securing “100% certainty” and making a distinction between those cases from those where someone is convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt”. People defending bullies with appeals to the First Amendment. The usual kind of crap.

  481. Big Brother Ogvorbis: I am Watching says

    Meta-disclaimer: Why do I feel the need to add the disclaimer?

    Big Brother.

    Sorry, my software was fritzing (damn German software!). What was that again?

  482. starstuff91 says

    A bunch of people saying how stupid and irrelevant “Elevatorgate” was (coupled with defences of Dawkins on the issue). An ass who has no qualms about supporting the death penalty despite evidence of the problems with securing “100% certainty” and making a distinction between those cases from those where someone is convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt”. People defending bullies with appeals to the First Amendment. The usual kind of crap.

    Ah, I see. Yeah, I know what you mean. Here it’s not just atheists. At other sites its a bunch of people who just happen to be atheists. But here I think people aren’t just atheists, they’re also humanists. And being a humanist means that you won’t accept inequalities and bigotry.

    I’ve never read the comments section there, but I do read the blog regularly. I saw the post about the kid being suspended for homophobic comments. I completely disagree with his position (that it wasn’t justified to suspend him).

  483. says

    I live in a city with some lovely bike paths. Lovely, that is, on every day except Sunday when they’re full of cars and SUVs. This puzzled me for many weeks and in fact I even called the cops to tell them about this ticket bonanza. Then I found out what was going on: it’s legal for a car to park in the bike lane if the occupants are going to church. What do people think: On a scale of 1 to 10, how big a waste of time would campaigning to get this law changed be?

    9, maybe. It’s probably unconstitutional, but of all the manifestations of religious privilege I can think of, this is probably not the most egregious.

    (Reminds me of the Sunday trading statute that still exists in England, restricting most shops’ opening hours on Sundays to six hours between 10am-6pm, unless they apply for a 24-hour licence. Again, the restriction is irrational and mildly irritating, but it isn’t really that big a deal, and I suppose at least it gives retail workers some time off.)

  485. Antiochus Epiphanes says

    Markita Lynda, healthcare is a damn right:

    Taking a shotgun approach, have you ever tried one of those antibiotics that kills all your gut flora and then re-populating by eating lots of fresh yogourt?

    Seven times in the last three years–I was initially misdiagnosed with diverticulosis. It’s a hoot every time*. I highly recommend it for anyone seeking a weight-loss alternative that is both painful and potentially embarrassing.

    *Levoflaxin is one of my favorites. Makes you feel like your joints are about to rupture. Although the continual metallic taste provided my metronidazole is really hard to beat. Meh.

  486. says

    Katrina (@466):

    Hmmm…. If I heard that story from a stranger, I’d be tempted to think your friends’ son was guilty of parental abduction; hearing it from a trusted source, I’m tempted to ask what it is I’m missing/failing to understand?

    He took this woman’s son (his, too, of course, but still hers) across state lines for a “visit” to the grandparents, and they just never came home? Did I misunderstand?

    I assume there was some predicate for this? You say “it’s likely that [the girlfriend has] been hurting the daughter” while the boyfriend and their son have been away; was she abusing the son before they left? Was that documented in any way before they left?

    You know the people involved, and are on this young man’s side, and that’s good enough for me… but I sure would love to know <PaulHarvey>the rest… of the story.</PaulHarvey>

    In the meantime, I hope someone will step up with info about rights and resources for them; I sure as hell don’t know.

  487. says

    starstuff91 (@476):

    I’m just happy that I won’t have to fend for myself in the health insurance market when I turn 21.

    Yah, the fact that we’ll be able to keep our daughter on our plan not only through college, but through (most of, depending) graduate school and the fact that she won’t have to face exclusion due to her cancer history when she does have to get her own insurance are the first things I think of (and usually the first things I say) when I hear somebody talking about “Obama hasn’t done anything.”

    BTW, on our plan, it was already 23 (for full-time students) under the old system, and I thought that was standard; your plan would’ve kicked you off at 21?

  488. starstuff91 says

    BTW, on our plan, it was already 23 (for full-time students) under the old system, and I thought that was standard; your plan would’ve kicked you off at 21?

    That’s what my mother said. Our plan is a good plan but they have some really stupid policies (like the fact that they won’t pay for birth control pills).

  489. Dianne says

    Levoflaxin is one of my favorites. Makes you feel like your joints are about to rupture.

    It’s been known to happen. Not all your joints, but at least a tendon or two rupturing anyway. Please be careful with that one and the other floxins. (But not to the point of refusing to use it if it really is the thing most likely to help and least likely to hurt…)

  490. julian says

    @Ibis3

    It’s not that bad. Looking over the comments on that Christian student’s suspension the majority agrees with you for the reasons you cited. A couple thick ones but that’s the risk you run with the interwebs, sadly.

  491. says

    starstuff91:

    Our plan is a good plan but they have some really stupid policies (like the fact that they won’t pay for birth control pills).

    That’s (you should pardon the expression) fucked up! I bet they pay for prenatal care and labor and delivery, don’t they? I guess preventive medicine isn’t their strong suit, eh?

    BTW, JOOC, do they cover abortion?

  492. starstuff91 says

    @ Bill
    Yeah, it’s pretty fucked up. It is through my mother’s employers, who just happen to be a catholic group of hospitals. My mother was pissed when she found out about them not covering birth control. Thanks ok though, I get it for free from *gasp* the government. Which is really funny because of the people complaining about the health care law now mandating that insurance companies pay for birth control, because they’re the people who’d freak out if they were smart enough to realize that the government pays for a lot of birth control.

  494. Tigger_the_Wing says

    tim rowledge,

    I am fortunate that I’m a Brit with a permanent residence in Ireland; reciprocal health agreements mean that I get all emergency treatment free here in Australia and a visitor’s Medicare card which covers some elective and prescription costs. However, I do have to have private health insurance to cover most of the remaining stuff (treatment/meds for my ank. spond. and related conditions aren’t covered). My problem is that hubby’s employers didn’t like the private health cover that was attached to our travel insurance and insisted we bought a different one; not being able to afford both means that we now don’t have (and cannot get) travel insurance, so I cannot afford to go home unless I get a medical repatriation.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    We have problems here with cars on bike paths on Sundays, but not for worship of a spiritual kind; usually because of people trying to get as close as possible to football matches!

    A couple of weeks ago, after a visit to the doctor, Number 3 Son was getting bored at the tiny shopping centre where the medical centre is (we had a two hour wait for hubby to give us a lift home after work) and decided to push me to the next town. It was bad enough having to remove wheelie bins from the footpath (that should have been removed the day before) to make room for the wheelchair, never mind dodging crumbled patches of tarmac once we left the suburb. We were joking that we would be safer in the road when, as we approached a bend, we were confronted by a police car approaching us at speed. Fortunately the driver saw us in time (or was alerted by his passenger), stopped, looked for a gap in the traffic, and crossed onto the road. We (son and I) couldn’t work out where he had come from or why he would be driving on the footpath. The only building around was a church, which has a driveway onto a different street.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    WRT gut problems; I seem to remember reading something about research in Australia that deliberately infested cœliacs with (hook?)worms, and enabled them to consume wheat. Must look it up.

    Ah yes, here and here. That was two years ago; here is a follow-up abstract on PLoS one.

    […]In a 21-week, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study, we explored the effects of N. americanus infection in 20 healthy, helminth-naïve adults with celiac disease well controlled by diet.[…]
    Results
    Enteric colonisation with hookworm established in all 10 cases, resulting in transiently painful enteritis in 5. Chronic infection was asymptomatic, with no effect on hemoglobin levels. Although some duodenal eosinophilia was apparent, hookworm-infected mucosa retained a healthy appearance. In both groups, wheat challenge caused deterioration in both primary and several secondary outcomes.
    Conclusions
    Experimental N. americanus infection proved to be safe and enabled testing its effect on a range of measures of the human autoimmune response. Infection imposed no obvious benefit on pathology.

  495. Rey Fox says

    At other sites its a bunch of people who just happen to be atheists.

    I get the feeling that there are a lot of people who are atheists just because they want to shock people and/or lord their superior intellect over people. Mensa atheists, let’s call them. Or Dwight Schrute atheists.

    Then again, our humanism and compassion for women and minorities is apparently pretty shocking.

  496. says

    Benjamin Geiger – keep on enjoying YOUR results/fruits and I’ll do the same on my side of the fence. You know, you keep asking me for citations, of which when I DO give citations, you call it “spam”. On the other hand, when the media, doctors and health “officials” say that vaccines have saved millions of lives, where are THEIR citations? They never give any. They have ZERO long-term studies on the safety/efficacy of vaccines – especially any that aren’t financed by Merck, GSK, Bayer or Sanofi Pasteur. All of the “results” are cooked to perpetuate their vampiric corporations.

    Does this qualify as an anti-vaxxer bullshit bingo?

  497. kristinc says

    Hey! Turns out black plums contain enough pectin to gel up on their own. Yummy plum jam for breakfast tomorrow.

  498. Tigger_the_Wing says

    kristinc,

    Yay for plum jam! =^_^=

    Benjamin “Walter Waldowski” Geiger,

    Bingo! Your prize (chocolate, bacon, tipple of your choice) coming through a USB near you!

  499. cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniac says

    Hey! Turns out black plums contain enough pectin to gel up on their own. Yummy plum jam for breakfast tomorrow.

    *big, pleading eyes*
    Can…can I have some?
    –

  500. Katrina, radicales féministes athées says

    Bill, yeah it’s all pretty weird.

         I left a lot of the story I have out for privacy’s sake, but it sounds like there were problems before he left. His parents (my friends) were asked to come out and get him, which they did. She helped them load the car. (She also threw the car seat down the stairs at him, so…)

         I don’t think his intent was to stay. It sounds as if problems escalated to the point where he doesn’t want to return. As for hurting the girl, I know little. My friend says that they were on speaker phone with her when she was screaming at him to come home because she couldn’t “control” her daughter. Then they heard the little girl scream, “OW!!! Mommy you hurt my arm!!” She calls him repeatedly. One day she called 80 times. When they finally stopped answering her calls, she called the police to investigate – at 3 a.m.

         Like I said, it’s a mess and right now I think they’re just trying to make sure they have everything documented and they’re looking for advocacy resources.