Jellyfish gettin’ it on, baby

This is too much verisimilitude. The movie below is of the mating behavior of the jellyfish Carybdea sivickisi, and the first thing you’ll notice is that the scientists have set it to good old classic porn music.

The second thing you’ll notice, that I found annoying, is that they used too high a power objective to film it, so everything is jerking everywhere and none of the participants stay in the field of view for any length of time. Why is it that porn is afflicted with so many gynecological close-ups? Come on, set the mood, show us whole individuals instead of fragmented zooms of body parts.

A comprehensive plan for the enhancement of sexual morality among the people

The Reverend Peter Mullin doesn’t like those darn pushy homosexuals — they must make him feel uncomfortable and all squirmy deep down inside. He wrote some amazingly stupid things about gays.

The Rev Dr Peter Mullen said in an blog that homosexuality was “clearly unnatural, a perversion and corruption of natural instincts and affections” and “a cause of fatal disease”.

He recommended that homosexual practices be discouraged “after the style of warnings on cigarette packets”.

He wrote: “Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH and their chins with FELLATIO KILLS.”

What about the heterosexual women? Everyone forgets the loving ladies in these arguments. Do they also get chin tattoos? That would be a real shame. And then there are those heterosexual couples that engage in all of the same activities that homosexuals do — why do they get a free pass from the Rev. Mullen?

He also didn’t say a thing about cunnilingus, but they never do. Lesbians also always get a free pass, and it’s just not fair. I’m beginning to think they are god’s favored people.

Let’s just simplify everything. At birth, everyone, male and female, gender preference as yet undetermined, gets two tattoos. One on their backside that says “EXIT ONLY”, with big bold pointy arrows, and one on their tongue that says “FOOD ONLY”. Since human beings are naturally obedient and incurious, these injunctions will of course be followed to the letter, and no one will ever be so rebellious as to try and see what else these body parts can do. They especially won’t be tempted by the instructions to the contrary so boldly written on their bodies.

I suppose that if people insist on being obedient, but start getting creative, we can extend the tattooing program to nostrils, armpits, earholes, hair, the bendy elbow bits, the back of the knee, toes, fingers and palms (Of course! Palms are very naughty), that very sexy curve at the nape of the neck, household pets, underwear, soles of the feet, washing machines, noses, eyelashes, feather dusters, shoes, athletic socks, belly buttons, nipples, lips, beards, showerheads, the Bible, pommel horses, horses, my little ponies, anything vaguely phallic, anything with a hole in it, skin, oh heck, everything except Tab A and Slot B. They’re all dangerous, except for the aforementioned Tab A and Slot B, which never get anyone into trouble and never cause any risk or danger when used properly, errm, I mean, naturally. And of course, when everything is labeled, and someone sees a nice silk tie prominently marked “NOT FOR SEXUAL PURPOSES”, no one will get any crazy ideas.

We should also begin a pattern of early childhood education in which the little tykes are instructed in exactly what is “natural”, and informed that they can’t do anything “unnatural”. As a textbook, I recommend Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which takes a very ecumenical approach to the subject. Remember, kiddies, don’t do anything a sponge louse or a duck or Acarophenax mahunkai wouldn’t do!

Rev. Mullin lacks the courage of his convictions, however; now he plays the “my best friends are gay” and “I was only joking” cards very unconvincingly.

But the rector insisted that he meant to harm: “I wrote some satirical things on my blog and anybody with an ounce of sense of humour or any understanding of the tradition of English satire would immediately assume that they’re light-hearted jokes. I certainly have nothing against homosexuals. Many of my dear friends have been and are of that persuasion. What I have got against them is the militant preaching of homosexuality.”

Here’s a hint, Rev. Mullin: it’s only satire if you say the cruel things about some people with he intent of mocking the cruelty, not to promote the continued discrimination against the people.

Besides, some of the practices Rev Mullin derides may actually have some health benefits.

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He doesn’t know me very well, does he?

I get all kinds of personal requests — requests to flog someone’s blog, links to articles people think are really neat, that kind of thing. I don’t mind at all. If you think I’d be interested, go ahead, drop me a line. But, you know, I would appreciate it if you at least had the courtesy to actually look at my interests and send me stuff I might like, instead of random spam.

Mike Koelzer did not have those kinds of manners. Mike Koelzer really screwed up. This is the email Mike Koelzer sent me.

My name is Mike Koelzer and I am the owner of Kay Pharmacy in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I thought you might be interested in seeing the recent coverage on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson of our pharmacy’s policy to not sell contraceptives. You will find the link to the ABC video at www.prolifepharmacy.com.

Ours is a very important story on the abortifacient properties of birth control pills and why we no longer carry them in our third-generation, family-owned pharmacy.

I would enjoy speaking at your church or your organization’s conference or other event. I also would be honored to have you share my apostolate in your blog etc. To learn more about my apostolate, please see www.prolifepharmacy.com

Mike Koelzer is very proud of his ignorance and his priggish desire to control the sexual behavior of his customers; I think Mike Koelzer is a contemptible, sanctimonious ass, and I hope he goes out of business. Please, if you live in Grand Rapids, boycott Kay Pharmacy. If Mike Koelzer comes to your town to speak in some demented fundagelical church, feel free to picket and protest, and feel free to attend and grill him with difficult questions.

If Mike Koelzer is not comfortable fulfilling his responsibilities as a pharmacist, he should seek some other line of work.

Remember Mike Koelzer, though. This is what they want. They aren’t going to stop with simply limiting access to abortions: next they’ll be eliminating all family planning options.

The pharmacy has a customer satisfaction survey. Help them get better informed!

Protecting the Right of Conscience?

Guest Blogger Danio, sneaking a few more posts in:

Remember that execrable HHS policy document that proposes an extension of the current protections for health care workers who refuse to provide or assist in treatments that they personally find morally objectionable? I did a little back-tracking on this issue, and followed the trail of HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, who requested this regulation after a “disappointing” interaction with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. He has since been unwavering in his support of the proposal–which he claims is not about abortion OR contraception, but about conscience rights–and has a recent blog post responding to the feedback he’s received from pro-choice activists as a result of the leaked document.

Here’s the money quote:

Is the fear here that so many doctors will refuse that it will somehow make it difficult for a woman to get an abortion? That hasn’t happened, but what if it did? Wouldn’t that be an important and legitimate social statement?

“Social statement?” I can scarcely get my mind around the fact that he is so openly, unapologetically endorsing a policy in which pious opinion would trump secular law. Once again, though, it shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, he himself states that “The Bush Administration has consistently supported the unborn”. Ah yes, even as they indiscriminately leech the quality of life (if not the life itself) from countless other self-aware, functioning humans on the planet, each and every blastocyst they encounter is ceremoniously wrapped in a mantle of sanctimonious protection.

Somehow even more disheartening are the numerous fawning, unctuous comments on Leavitt’s recent blog entry. One wrote:

Secretary Leavitt,

It is beyond my comprehension that anyone would be offended by a health care professional who valued human life. But the tragedy is our culture has regressed to a form of barbarism unseen in centuries where progress in technology and science has poisoned our minds, hearts and souls where the intentional destruction of innocent and vulnerable human life has become more important than saving it.

Those of us living and working in a society where human life is expendable by government dictate but fail to stand up to protect and cherish life at any and all costs will live to regret it.

You are doing the right thing Secretary by allowing those of us in the health care profession live our moral and ethical consciences rather than forcing us to choose another profession.

Choose another profession like….a PETA supporter working in a meat packing plant?An auto mechanic who doesn’t support the use of fossil fuels?

Keep your eyes on this one. It has ‘lame duck’s parting shot’ written all over it.
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UPDATE: Leavitt has a new blog entry up today announcing that the proposed rule is being filed in the Federal Register. Although the final draft no longer contains the specific language broadening the definition of “abortion” to include anything from “conception” onward, it still threatens to withhold Federal money if health care organizations don’t allow their employees to exercise their rights of conscience.

Canada honors Dr Henry Morgentaler

Good work, Canada, and it’s an honor long due.

Now 85, Morgentaler, a Polish Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Montreal after the war, opened his first abortion clinic in 1969 and performed thousands of procedures, which were illegal at the time.

Morgentaler, a trained family physician, argued that access to abortion was a basic human right and women should not have to risk death at the hands of an untrained professional in order to end their pregnancies.

Morgentaler’s clinics were constantly raided, and one in Toronto was firebombed. Morgentaler was arrested several times and spent months in jail as he fought his case at all court levels in Canada.

His victory came on Jan. 28, 1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s abortion law. That law, which required a woman who wanted an abortion to appeal to a three-doctor hospital abortion committee, was declared unconstitutional.

Feminist and author Judy Rebick told the Globe and Mail on Monday that it is about time Morgentaler is honoured for his long battle.

“Dr. Morgentaler is a hero to millions of women in the country,” she said. “He risked his life to struggle for women’s rights … He’s a huge figure in Canadian history and the fact that he hasn’t got [the Order of Canada] until now is a scandal.”

Conservatives and the anti-choice crowd are squealing over it, but who cares what the ignoramuses say? This is a man who has improved the lives of human beings.

The Pastor Ray Mummert award goes to…

…Republican Representative John Duncan of Tennessee. Confronted with a vast amount of evidence provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the US Institute of Medicine , the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Psychological Association that abstinence-only education does not work, does not reduce the incidence of either teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted disease, and that it is a waste of money, the honorable Mr Duncan declared his complete disinterest in data and expertise.

Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding.

Nobody is advocating an abandonment of the idea of encouraging abstinence; they’re saying that abstinence-only is a failure, and we should be encouraging dissemination of more information. I know, that’s terribly elitist — how dare we oppose some parents’ desire to keep their children ignorant and stupid.

I should also hand out an anti-Mummert to Henry Waxman, who deserves a lifetime award.

Panel chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said, “We are showering funds on abstinence-only programs that don’t appear to work, while ignoring proven comprehensive sex education programs that can delay sex, protect teens from disease, and result in fewer teen pregnancies.”

Scorpio: The black lights in your bedroom will pay off in a big way — expect a fluorescent romantic entanglement in your near future. Male Scorpios should definitely invest in life insurance.

Return of the Manimal

Britain is experiencing some dissent over research on human-animal hybrid embryos. One the one hand, you’ve got researchers and charities arguing that this is a technique to probe deeper into the genetic and molecular properties of developing organisms, and is key to developing treatments for genetic diseases and developmental abnormalities; on the other side, we have plaintive lowing from the do-nothings and ignoramuses about the “sacredness” of human life, and kneejerk rejection by the usual collection of suspects, the Catholic church.

In his Easter address today, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, will describe plans to allow hybrid human-animal embryos as “monstrous”.

I addressed this a couple of years ago when Bush wanted to ban this kind of research (by the way, we aren’t ahead of the Brits in this game; they’re at least discussing this, while our government has mostly acted to shut this work down, leaving little to argue over). This is not a science-fiction project to create half-human slave labor or anything silly like that — it is serious research in early development that puts human disease-related forms of genes into animal models so that we can try experimental treatments. “Monstrous” would be taking risks or doing experiments on Down syndrome children; humane would be inducing an analog of Down syndrome in mice so that we can figure out causes and treatments of health problems in an informed way. I would also put using ignorance and medieval dogma to prevent biomedical research in the “monstrous” category, but then, I put just about everything about the Catholic church in that bin.

Just so everyone knows precisely where I’m coming from, though, in addition to appreciating the practical value of hybrid research for alleviating human suffering, I also think all forms of reproductive biotechnology are just plain cool. Some people think the next revolution in humanity will be an outcome of advances in neuroscience and technology (the geek rapture), but I’m inclined to think that the most significant changes in how we think about who we are are going to arise from radical reproductive technologies.

Reproductive history writ in the genome

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Fossils are cool, but some of us are interested in processes and structures that don’t fossilize well. For instance, if you want to know more about the evolution of mammalian reproduction, you’d best not pin your hopes on the discovery of a series of fossilized placentas, or fossilized mammary glands … and although a few fossilized invertebrate embryos have been discovered, their preservation relied on conditions not found inside the rotting gut cavity of dead pregnant mammals.

You’d think this would mean we’re right out of luck, but as it turns out, we have a place to turn to, a different kind of fossil. These are fossil genes, relics of our ancient past, and they are found by digging in the debris of our genomes. By comparing the sequences of genes of known function in different lineages, we can get a measure of divergence times … and in the case of some genes which have discrete functions, we can even plot the times of origin or loss of those particular functions in the organism’s history.

Here’s one example. We don’t have any fossilized placentas, but we know that there was an important transition in the mammalian lineage: we had to have shifted from producing eggs in which yolk was the primary source of embryonic nutrition to a state where the embryo acquired its nutrition from a direct interface with maternal circulation, the placenta. We modern mammals don’t need yolk at all … but could there be vestiges of yolk proteins still left buried in our genome? The answer, which you already know since I’m writing this, is yes.

[Read more…]

In which I agree with the Jehovah’s Witnesses…for different reasons

Usually, when I read one of these common stories about people denying themselves reasonable medical care for religious reasons (such as the Jehovah Witness’s proscription against blood transfusions, or the Christian Scientist’s insane denial of illness altogether), I find myself siding with the doctor trying to overcome their foolishness, rather than the deluded theists. This one is an exception.

To make it short, a Jehovah’s Witness couple are expecting twins; one of the twins has a circulation defect that prevents pulmonary circulation, meaning it would suffocate to death as soon as it was born and needed to breathe air; they refuse any surgery to correct the problem; doctor gets a court order, operates at birth against the parent’s wishes, and saves the infant.

I think the doctor was way out of line. This is a case in which the parents were fully aware of the situation and knew that the fetus would die at birth, and elected (for screwy reasons, admittedly) to not pursue extraordinary measures to save its life. They had not deluded themselves into believing medical intervention was unnecessary and that magic would heal the child, they had resigned themselves to its death. And until the child has enough self-awareness to actually want to live, I think that is a decision parents have to be allowed to make. If they want that particular baby, they should be allowed to elect to have major surgery, but if they don’t, they should be permitted to allow its condition to run its course, unless the outcome is likely to be survival with serious damage.

The cost of these medical interventions can be prohibitive, and it can be entirely reasonable to decide not to invest money and time into a fetus who has neither autonomy nor unique qualities, nor an individual personality to which the parents have attached their affection. Let them die. Let the parents decide, not a doctor.

The article cites a particularly horrendous case.

In 1990, for example, a woman named Karla Miller went into premature labor at 23 weeks of gestation in Houston. Because a child born that early has a 75 percent chance of death or severe disability, the husband chose not to sign a consent form that would allow resuscitation. But the neonatologist resuscitated the girl, who grew up severely retarded, legally blind, and quadriplegic. The parents sued the hospital for ignoring their wishes, but in 2000 the Texas Supreme Court ruled for the hospital. George Annas, a medical ethicist at Boston University, later attacked the decision in the New England Journal of Medicine, since “the court implies that life is always preferable to death for a newborn . . . no matter how unlikely their survival is without severe disabilities.”

I wonder if that neonatologist has since taken responsibility for the round-the-clock care and various expenses and stresses of that kind of affliction?

Willfully obtuse

The principal of a high school in Texas (where else?) is censoring the school’s yearbook.

Senior Megan Estes, editor in chief of The Elk, said the point of the article, featuring two seniors who also are teen mothers, was to show fellow students how the girls are coping with motherhood and how their lives have changed. Estes said the principal told her he felt the article “glamorized” the teen mothers’ mistakes.

Principal Paul Cash said the topic of the article conflicts with the school’s abstinence-based curriculum. He also said he does not think the community would want that topic covered in the yearbook.

I think reality conflicts with the school’s abstinence-based curriculum. I wonder if he’s got an answer for that?

Probably something like “close your eyes real hard.”