I find it appropriate to read about this on Fox News

The military has plans for a new kind of drone robot that will wander the wastelands of future battlefields, scooping up organic debris — such as dead bodies — and burning them to fuel their advance. The call it an EATR: Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot.

It’s kind of sweet, in a morbid way. It recycles! It uses renewable energy! Put a gun on it, and it could even harvest its own fuel as it mows its way through the enemy’s cities!

To be perfectly fair, though, the company building it doesn’t talk about using bodies for energy, but is more about generic biomass. Bodies are probably messy and inefficient compared to hunks of wood or corn stubble. It’s Fox News that emphasized the corpse-eating idea, which somehow seems like just the kind of thing Fox would find copacetic.

Burned out on the bickering among the pro-science forces?

Then you need to turn to the non-scientists for some refreshing expressions of unity. Or not.

A New Age magazine in Minnesota is under new management, and the editor wants to exercise some “quality control”: astrology, fairies, life-force energy, and spiritual quests are OK. Channeling and paganism are out. This has annoyed the so-open-minded-their-brains-have-fallen-out crowd.

Other New Age leaders are appalled.

“He is excluding channeling? Yikes. Or pagans? He should not be doing that,” said Kathy McGee, editor of the Washington-state-based magazine New Age Retailer.

“New Age is an umbrella term encompassing anything on a spiritual path — Bigfoot, Jesus, Buddha. Even worshipping a frog is sort of OK,” McGee said.

She said New Age thinking is all-or-nothing — you either have an open mind to all beliefs, or you don’t. It is wrong for anyone to pick which beliefs are acceptable.

“You don’t want to say, ‘This is OK, and this is not,’ ” McGee said. “There is nothing we would exclude. We are about goodwill to men.”

Her definition, then, puts Bigfoot believers shoulder-to-shoulder beside organic farmers. Along with channeling, she includes the Fair Trade movement, which promotes products that benefit Third World farmers.

Wait a minute…worshipping a frog is sort of OK? Only “sort of”? I am offended. Why is she belittling the faith of frog-worshippers all around the world?

The rest of the story has some interesting information about the cracks in the New Age universe. Organic farmers would rather not be associated with fairies. Chiropractors really hate it — one says, “That New Age connection should not be made. I cannot see how anyone can put chiropractic care and Bigfoot together.” To which I can only reply, well, what if Bigfoot has an aching back, huh? He’s bipedal, he’s probably got the same difficulties we do.

By the way, one psychic also joyfully reports that the poor economy is helping her business.

David Klinghoffer will be eaten last

There are intelligent true believers, deluded as they are, but there also a few of them out there who will simply take your breath away with statements of such pretentious stupidity that you wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning. Case in point: David Klinghoffer. If you’re already familiar with him, you won’t be surprised at this. He’s written an essay in which he takes to task the concept of convergent evolution, as espoused by Ken Miller and Simon Conway Morris. I don’t care much for the way Miller and Conway Morris use the idea myself, but Klinghoffer’s argument…man. You’d think it was a parody if you didn’t know Klinghoffer.

His argument against convergence is that if it were true, then evolution could have led to something truly repulsive, like Cthulhu.

Literally Cthulhu. He quotes a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, “Darwinism’s visionary storyteller,” and cites me linking to the “Unholy Bible”, and claims that “Darwinists love him”. Apparently, we aren’t just unbelievers, or even merely Satan-worshippers anymore — we’ve moved on to worshipping inimical alien beings beyond space and time that intend to remorselessly destroy us. Ken Miller (!) is naively promoting the adoration of monsters when he suggests that maybe his god wasn’t so specific in his mechanisms as to demand mammalian bipeds as the recipients of ensoulment.

Ken Miller hasn’t publicly expressed any known fondness for Lovecraft, and I don’t think his idea of evolution as a natural process undetectably adjusted by a benign deity would accommodate itself well to a Cthulhu-dominated universe. As for the rest of us, and me personally, H.P. Lovecraft’s stories are clearly fiction: we don’t see them as a portrayal of our universe at all. I find them entertaining because the descriptions are so flamboyantly over the top, and because, well, tentacles. There’s also the factor that, as an atheist, I find the similarities between a hostile anti-human monster and the Christian religion’s petty, cosmic tyrant amusing. Really, my shrine to the Elder Gods is very tiny, only taking up one of the smaller wings of my mansion. (Uh-oh, it’s Klinghoffer—he might think I mean that for real.)

Besides, if we rewound the tape of life and ran it forward again, and evolution led to intelligent cephalopods, an anthropocentric bigot like Klinghoffer might well regard them as “grotesque, obnoxious, loathsome, abhorrent, ghastly”, but I’d think them pretty cool…and most importantly, these beings would consider their own forms beautiful, and us strangely twisted chordates as hideous.

Oh, by the way: nobody should tell him how Pharyngula appears in some dusty corners of Cthulhu lore.

I’m just going to have to get this shirt, to make Klinghoffer tremble.

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Because we know that in his house at R’lyeh dead C’thulhu waits dreaming.

Michael Jackson news

I know! He’s dead! But that’s one corpse that you know isn’t going to rest easily.

First, the ghouls are out in force. “psychic” ghoul James Van Praagh says he’s been having conversations with Jackson’s ghost; ghoul enabler Oprah Winfrey has quickly snatched him up to appear on her show and make the entire country disgusted.

Sylvia Browne, quick to gnaw the scraps off the bones, now claims that she has been chatting with the dead guy. Coming in second means she gets the consolation prize of appearing on the Montel Williams show.

There is now a video circulating about that claims to have captured Jackson’s ghost walking through a hallway in Neverland. Oh, the ignominy of it all: lively, talented, enthusiastic black kid, reduced to creepy, wispy white man, and now at the end, seen as nothing more than a compression artifact.

Finally, after the flesh has been stripped from his bones, something has to be done with those untidy scraps of discarded mortality, lest they interfere with subsequent myths about his faked death and new life frolicking about with Elvis. There will be a memorial service. A huge, overblown, expensive memorial service to the tune of $2.5 million. Would you believe there is a poll about who should pay for it?

Should California Taxpayers Pay For Michael Jackson’s Memorial?

Yes, absolutely, 100%. 46.73%

They should pay for some of it, and the Jacksons should also help pay. 22.43%

No, this is not their responsibility. 30.84%

They can’t be serious. A dead wealthy popular entertainer with an extremely checkered reputation should not be receiving a state-sponsored funeral.

(via Tommy Holland’s Vision)

Poor business plan

I don’t think I’d trust this Latvian money-lender to stay in business for long — he’s giving small loans and asking for your soul as the only collateral. He doesn’t employ collection agents, using only fear and superstition to get people to pay him back, which might work for a little while…but only until the atheists show up. Sure, I’ll take a loan for $500, and hey, I think I’ll just default and let you keep the collateral. If you only want to trust me for $1.98, that’s fine, I’ll take it and you can have my soul for as long as you want.

There’s also a poll with the story: Would you use your soul as collateral for a loan?. Unfortunately, you’ll have to until tomorrow to get the results.

Gosh, I think I went to the wrong meeting

While I was off at the Lindau Nobel meeting, hanging out with mere Nobel prize winners and scientists and enthusiastic graduate students, I seem to have missed my chance to hang out with fairies and angels.

About 250 people came to the Methow Valley June 26 through 28 from as far away as Europe and Hawaii to participate in the ninth annual Fairy and Human Relations Congress, an outdoor festival in a secluded mountain meadow called Skalitude.

Hey, I know where that is — near Twisp (a wonderful name for a fairy congress), Washington, and very lovely place. And they were gathered for such a noble purpose!

“The purpose of the congress is to encourage communication and cooperation of the fairy realm,” said Michael “Skeeter” Pilarski, the event’s founder and organizer.

The human world is in crisis and can use all the help it can get, Pilarski said, so why not form alliances with those in other realms?

Why not, indeed. It sounds so reasonable. They’re also right about something.

Skeptics might mock the participants or dismiss them as New Age hippies, but they say their belief system is not much different from Native American animists or even Christians who believe in angels.

You’re exactly right, Skeeter. There’s no difference at all between what you’re doing and what’s going on in churches every day, all across the world.

Customize your bible!

Once upon a time, people like Thomas Jefferson would take scissors to their bibles to produce a customized versions that better represented their beliefs. It is now the 21st century; all you need is an internet connection and a little comfort with the Unix command line to tweak the bible into any state you want, and who wouldn’t want the HPL edition of the Unholy Bible. Abdul Alhazred would have loved this.

One of us

Our respectability among juvenile fans of Harry Potter may have just gone up a notch: Daniel Radcliffe has cheerfully declared himself to be an atheist.

I’m an atheist, but I’m very relaxed about it. I don’t preach my atheism, but I have a huge amount of respect for people like Richard Dawkins who do. Anything he does on television, I will watch.

I understand that this same segment of society has also found a heightened interest in the works of playwrights like Peter Schaffer, so we know the Harry Potter effect can help. If only Radcliffe had an excuse to take his clothes off for atheism…

Of course there is also the complementary effect that the people who were convinced that both Harry Potter and atheism were the demon-spawned products of Hell have now had their suspicions confirmed.