Welp, yeah, that convinced me

Those ghosthunter shows are all looking for evidence of an afterlife and of spirits hanging about to communicate with us, and finally a group of ghosthunters in Oklahoma have found it. They’ve been exploring a decrepit basement in an abandoned urban building — you know, the kind of place where teenagers might hang out and drink and get into mischief — and they left up a chalkboard, and when they weren’t around, messages appeared on it. Deep, cryptic, strange messages, so they must be from ghosties.

The lanky cowboy with the slow drawl is totally mystified by the paranormal message with its deep historical resonance scrawled on the board.

“THE CAKE IS A LIE.”

So profound. So inexplicable and enigmatic. I wonder what it means? Perhaps one of you will have insight into this perplexing arcane sign from another world.

Kraken man is back

He’s persistent, I’ll say that for him. I first encountered Mark McMenamin as an enthusiastic promoter of Stuart Pivar’s inflatable donut model of development. He then sank from sight, along with the pretentious septic tank salesmen, until two years ago, when he presented piles of ichthyosaur vertebrae as evidence that a giant cephalopod, a kraken, had been creating Mesozoic art by arranging the disks into a self portrait.

You may laugh now.

He presented at the Denver GSA meeting this year. Here’s his abstract.

THE KRAKEN’S BACK: NEW EVIDENCE REGARDING POSSIBLE CEPHALOPOD ARRANGEMENT OF ICHTHYOSAUR SKELETONS

MCMENAMIN, Mark A.S. and SCHULTE MCMENAMIN, Dianna L., Geology and Geography, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA 01075

In 2011, we hypothesized that extremely large Triassic cephalopods may be responsible for certain anomalous aspects of an unusual assemblage of giant ichthyosaur skeletons in the Luning Formation of Nevada. The hypothesis has been criticized by researchers who do not accept the ichnological evidence suggesting that the skeletons were deliberately arranged rather than being deposited by currents.

Hydrodynamic considerations regarding the probability of displacement (PD) of ichthyosaur vertebral centra arrays (n=12) show that three different biserial arrangements have PDs of 17%, 89% and 100% respectively by currents strong enough to displace a single centra. The critical Specimen U array at Berlin‑Ichthyosaur State Park has PD=~100, indicating that it is highly unlikely that the biserial pattern was imparted by submarine currents. The unwinnowed wackestone matrix confirms that competent water velocities did not frequently occur in this deep-water depositional environment. The Luning Formation also hosts Protopaleodictyon ichnosp. and supergiant amphipods.

We recently obtained photographs of a retired exhibit formerly on display at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Museum of Natural History. The display reconstructed a well‑preserved Shonisaurus skeleton as it was found in the field. The exhibit is well documented by photographs from a variety of vantage points. The skeleton appears to have been partly disassembled during the Triassic, and a biserial array of centra very similar to the Specimen U array occurs adjacent to the nearly complete skeleton. The UNLV array has a PD=~100, again indicating that the biserial pattern was not the result of current assembly. Finally, at least three of these centra show what may be triangular bite marks removed from their margins.

His latest evidence consists of a second array of vertebrae in a line (that’s right, his earlier remarkable claim was based on a single example of bones in a line), and he is also claiming that a non-random arrangement of the bones can only be explained by an intelligent cephalopod, with no other natural processes possible.

Furthermore, as the Huffington Post credulously (their only mode) reports, he has additional evidence in the form of a giant fossilized beak. Here it is:

krakenbeak

It’s a fragmented, unidentified chunk of rock, a few inches long, which he extrapolates by comparison to a Humboldt squid beak he bought on eBay to be the tip of a giant beak belonging to a squid that was between 50 and 100 meters long.

That’s it. When ichthyosaurs decay, their vertebrae tend to fall in a line, and here’s a broken rock that kinda vaguely looks like a bit of a beak, and from this he builds this elaborate fantasy of a giant kraken roaming Triassic seas crushing ichthyosaurs to death and then sculpting their bones into squid pictures.

He should go back to praising balloon animals.

Whoops. I neglected to mention another indictment of his rationality: McMenamin is a “devout Christian” who also believes in Intelligent Design creationism.

My name is Mark McMenamin. I have completed a PhD on the fossils of the Cambrian Explosion, have published several books on the subject, and am a devout Christian. At the present time I am actively researching the latest fossil discoveries from Cambrian boundary strata.

Religion is destroying the nuclear family!

It’s not gays that are corrupting traditional family values, it’s god. The latest survey shows that members of Bible-believing churches are more likely to divorce than atheists are.

There are a number of explanations. Here’s one.

Secular couples tend to see both marriage and divorce as personal choices. Overall, a lower percent get married, which means that those who do may be particularly committed or well-suited to partnership. They are likely to be older if/when they do formally tie the knot. They have fewer babies, and their babies are more likely to be planned. Parenting, like other household responsibilities, is more likely to be egalitarian rather than based on the traditional model of “male headship.” Each of these factors could play a role in the divorce rate.

I also think there’s a difference between the sexes in traditional marriage, too: for women, it’s an obligation to live a life of service; for men, it’s a privilege to obtain a cheap servant who is required to give you cheap sex. That kind of differential can easily fracture what ought to be a partnership.

I’m relieved to see, though, that the article doesn’t imply that it’s something intrinsic to being an atheist, stating that it’s more like what slice of the socioeconomic pie you’re likely to get if you’re an atheist vs. a Christian, and it also suggests that the way to reduce divorce rates overall isn’t to get everyone to become an atheist, but to build a better social safety net and encourage more equality. Which also leads to more atheism, by the way, which is why the people suffering most under an unfair system will oppose changes to make it better.

I’m still going to deplore how all those religious organizations with “Family” prominently planted in their name are ironically poisoning the American family that they worship.

Fox News, Gretchen Carlson, Bill Donohue

There’s nothing in that title to entice you, is there? It was a panel on religion (ugh), and at least Dave Silverman was there to represent the rational side. And right out of the gate, Bill Donohue insults Silverman’s intelligence.

The whole thing was weighted against him, and it was clearly a setup, but I have to give Silverman props for staying cool and bringing the fight right into the heart of hostile territory.

Scariest story ever

The Discovery Institute is sponsoring an Alaskan cruise with the theme, “Science & Faith: Friends or Foes?”. They have two speakers, Stephen Meyer, long-winded pompous philosopher with a twisted version of science that supports his religious views, and John Lennox, theological bullfrog without a clue. So who’s speaking for the side of science? No one. They have no one qualified to do so at the DI.

But imagine being trapped on a boat with those two pretentious airheads for a week. <shudder>

Somebody care to decipher some 990 forms?

Here are the very latest tax forms from Answers in Genesis — they’re from 2011, so they’re a bit behind. The 990 form from AiG has a bottom line loss of about $400,000 for that year; the 990 for Crosswater, the front company for the Ark Encounter project, has a net gain of about $400,000. That’s about all I can decipher from them, so maybe some more experienced money managers can puzzle it out more thoroughly than I can.

I do see that Ken Ham gets a yearly salary that’s way over twice what I get. Ignorance pays!

White supremacists are getting a facelift?

At least, that’s what this guy Richard Spencer is claiming that he’s doing, trying to add a little intellectual respectability to a small gang of bigots. From this account of a conference the racists recently had, though, it sounds like the same old crap.

“If you cannot be for your own people, who can you be for?” one young man who gave his name as Helmut Schmidt said as a reason for attending the conference. “The reality is when white people are the minority in this country, it is going to be real bad.”

But really the conference was open to any number of overlapping topics that might attract disaffected white youngsters. Jack Donovan, an anti-feminist writer and “advocate for the resurgence of tribalism and manly virtue,” served up his shtick.

Donovan has argued that feminists are trying to create  “gender-neutral utopias” that will make men into “doughy bonobos and chunky Chaz Bonos playing out their endless manic-depressive melodramas in a big bean-flicking circle of sterility, sickness and desperation.”

“Do black people as a group care what happens to white people as a group? Does a Mexican dad with three babies care about whether some white kid from the burbs gets a summer landscaping job? Of course not,” Donovan said during his presentation, adding later, “You cannot play fair with people who don’t care if you get wiped off the map.”

Turn that last sentence around. Why should anyone play fair with white chauvinists who only care about brown people as nannies and gardners?

One message I got, though, was that the facelift seems to involve adding resentment against independent women to the stew of racial hatred that they usually tap into. It’s always been there, but in this story it’s pretty overt: white women must support the race by bearing lots of white babies.

You can find much more about the unsavory Richard Spencer at the SPLC. He’s currently head of the National Policy Institute, a racist think-tank founded by William Regnery, the far right wing publisher who also publishes a great many books by the Discovery Institute authors like Wells, Wiker, Richards, Gonzalez, Weikart, etc. It’s rather ironic that they love to publish books accusing evolution of being a Nazi plot fomenting Hitlerian ideas of eugenics, while at the same time promoting racial ideas that would have been right at home in Hitler’s government.

I hope a boggle eats them for Halloween

Answers in Genesis tries to explain the history of Halloween — and of course, the only way they can do that is to make shit up. I don’t know why, but I found their article particularly infuriating. Maybe it’s because they’re so shameless about inventing fictitious histories, and they exhibit no shame at all about it.

So we get to hear that Archbishop Ussher claimed that Halloween was the day that Adam and Eve sinned; that maybe it was to honor Noah’s wife, who died on a date not mentioned in the Bible; that it was a commemoration of all the people who died in a worldwide flood; that the devil did it. They build this entire speculative mythology based on people who didn’t exist and events that didn’t occur, and they pretend it’s history, just like they pretend creationism is science. It’s lies all the way through.

But then, I guess that isn’t hard for people who take pictures of an empty field and call it Noah’s Ark. It wasn’t a Great Deluge, it was a Great Delusion.

Also, this.

And next year, consider ordering Halloween booklets to hand out to those who come to your door. Candy and other treats are good, but there’s nothing that compares with the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Oh, man, I still remember those houses that handed out Bible tracts rather than candy when I went trick-or-treating as a kid. Yes, do that, because I learned to despise those smug jerks when they shafted little kids that way.

Don’t you hate those ninnies who abuse biology to defend their sexism?

Listen to Gavin McInnes rant. He makes up statistics, he raves that having women work goes “against 40,000 years of evolution”.

Women are forced to pretend to be men. They’re feigning this toughness. They’re miserable. Study after study has shown that feminism has made women less happy. They’re not happy in the work force, for the most part. I would guess 7 percent [of women] like not having kids, they want to be CEOs, they like staying at the office all night working on a proposal, and all power to them. But by enforcing that as the norm, you’re pulling these women away from what they naturally want to do, and you’re making them miserable.

His gut tells him that women prefer to live domestic lives. He berates others for citing mere ‘anecdotes’ while declaring that his twisted, baseless view of how the world works to be the absolute truth. McInnes really is committed to his unfounded views about sex roles.

Here’s the cold biological truth: (And it’s not based on fear or sexism or anything else you like to argue about in a classroom) Women’s bodies are not as good at making babies after 30. The hourglass turns upside down at that age and the sand keeps coming out until 35 when it is gone. Yes, I know you can still make babies after that. My mother had my brother at 40 and my youngest boy came out when my wife was 39. These are EXCEPTIONS. Liberals seem to think that one piece of anecdotal evidence completely wipes out mountains of evidence to the contrary. When discussing the vast majority of women, they TEND to prefer family to career and they TEND to want to make babies and they TEND to need to create them in their 20s / early 30s. This isn’t my opinion. It’s a general truth and the fact that simply stating it is controversial, shows how far the pendulum has swung into Crazy Town.

Mary Anne Franks did a great job rebutting him. If you watch the video, McInnes comes off as a total emotional bro-ron; Franks is calm and rational. Jennifer Raff has a much more thorough take-down.

Clearly, McInnes is suffering from excessive testosterone. Damn biology and the way it torments us men with these constant high hormonal levels!

I approve this message

Although the title is a bit weird: Atheists can’t be Republicans? That’s a bit off. One thing we know is that atheists can be all kinds of things: Republican, Libertarian (oh, jebus, but there are a lot smug Libertarian atheists), Progressive, smart, idiotic, egalitarian, elitist. The message is good, though: it’s not enough to just be an atheist. We have to stand up for something, rather than just being against something, and that means that atheism has to find a conscience.

Individual atheists can, of course, have wildly divergent views, but the atheist movement, if it is to have any political clout at all, must focus on some key issues and make those part of the message. If we are going to claim to have positions based on reason and the intelligent interpretation of the evidence, then the climate change denialists, the sexists, the racists, the narcissistic worshippers of the Holy Market…they cannot be regarded as representative. The ones who think the solution to Islamic theocracy is to bomb Muslim countries or deport brown people should be considered as lunatic and beyond the pale as atheists who advocate nuking the Vatican or ostracizing Catholics.

It’s time for the movement to address bigger and real issues, and the biggest issue of our time is income inequality. Of all the developed nations, the U.S. has the most unequal distribution of income. In the past decade, 95 percent of all economic gains have gone to the top 1 percent. A mere 400 individuals own one-half of the entire nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, median household income keeps falling, and our poverty levels resemble that of the Great Depression era. In other words, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is being decimated.

Atheists like to talk about building a better world, one that is absent of religiosity in the public square, but where are the atheist groups on helping tackle the single biggest tear in the fabric of our society — wealth disparity? They are nowhere. Its absence on the most pressing moral issue of our time makes it difficult for the movement to establish meaningful partnerships with other moral communities.

To remain white, middle class, intellectually smug and mostly apolitical will not only serve to alienate atheism from minorities and the poor, but will also ensure it remains a politically impotent movement that is incapable of building a better America. Growing up means less time and money spent on self-righteous billboard campaigns, and, instead, more resources allocated to fighting the political conditions that have caused this nation’s middle class and infrastructure to resemble that of a hyper-religious Third World nation.

I would broaden the mission a bit, though. On economic issues, atheists as a whole ought to be behind reducing the rich-poor divide — it’s the only rational position to take — but I would consider it legitimate to regard human rights as an umbrella topic to be more important, or to make the even bigger issue of environmental degradation the major crisis of our time. We can have a broad tent, but that does not include supporting ideas that conflict with reality.

Atheism is ultimately going to have to be a progressive political force, fighting for inclusion, evidence-based policy, humanist values, and the goal of expanding knowledge and power for all. We’re hampered right now by a rather reluctant leadership that tends to focus on pettier issues in the name of unity.