The Haeckelization of Paul Davies

Davies is up to his same old nonsense again: he’s in Australia, lecturing people about his theory of the causes of cancer.

Seven years ago, the National Cancer Institute in the US asked Professor Davies to use his insight as a physicist to look at cancer. His conclusion is that most cancer biologists are thinking about the problem the wrong way.

Rather than treat cancer as a disease of cell mutation, he and his colleague Dr Charley Lineweaver at the Australian National University have developed what they say is a new theory of cancer that traces its origins to the dawn of multicellular life more than a billion years ago.

Professor Davies believes cancer cells are a “reversion to an ancestral phenotype”, the physical expression of deep genetic information that springs from the very nature of multicellular life.

Goddamn.

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But how will you know?

The president of a fake university, Liberty University, wants students to carry guns so they can “end” Muslims before they even walk in the door.

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. urged students during Friday’s convocation to carry concealed weapons on campus in the wake of Wednesday’s massacre in San Bernardino, California.

Students erupted in applause; however, the remarks did not come without controversy after some felt Falwell unfairly called out an entire religion rather than just extremists.

It just blows my mind when I see that the president of the United States [says] that the answer to circumstances like that is more gun control, Falwell said. … I’ve always thought if more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in.

I’m trying to figure out how this works. So before they commit any crime, before they draw their guns and charge in blazing, you’re supposed to just shoot Muslims? But how will you know they’re terrorists? Is it just open season on Muslims?

He did clarify, and explain that not all Muslims are evil. Just the ones who shoot people.

I was referring to ‘those Muslims’ that just carried out attacks in Paris and California, he said in the tweet clarifying his comments.

So…we should be armed, so that we can shoot people who are, perhaps, carrying weapons before entering a college classroom, for instance? I don’t think he’s thought this through. He seems to be suggesting that we summarily execute religious fanatics and fundamentalists who are walking around public places with weapons, while telling an institution full of religious fanatics and fundamentalists that they should be carrying weapons in public places.

I’m trying to keep an open mind. I’m not at all a fan of violence, but if the college president wants to turn Liberty University into an apocalyptic wasteland of paranoid gunslingers, who am I to argue?

Open carry for the War on Christmas

Michele Fiore sent out a very American Christmas card.

fiore-xmas

Big ugly guns are so festive, aren’t they? But I hate to break the news to Fiore, but she has made a tactical error and has already lost a moral victory. Look at them. Look at those red shirts. Those plain red shirts. They are insufficiently Jesusy! They remind me of something else.

Starbucks-Red-Cups

You will burn forever in atheist hell, Michele Fiore, and I’m scoring another victory in our godless war on Christmas.

I’m also anticipating that next year, to forestall the really silly complaints about their cups that Starbucks has been getting, they’ll just strap a Glock onto their cups (venti sizes only) to satisfy the Christian aesthetic.

Is that what it means to be a girl?

On the Belle Jar, you can read about a girl’s personal history. It’s not a happy story. I was thinking that if I wrote a similar boy’s personal history, I could trot out a few tales — we all had scattered difficulties and conflicts while growing up — but the chilling thing is how normalized and how pettily girls’ problems are dismissed. When I faced bullies, I was told by friends and families to fight back, to deal with the problem, and my fears were taken seriously. When the girl in the story faces similar problems, the message is always to take it meekly, to not complain, to accept that boys will be boys. To live quietly in a world filled with threats, and to not try to change it.

This isn’t an old story. It’s still the dominant paradigm.

Amanda Marcotte saved me some work

What a relief. This is my first day off without a mountain of grading hanging over my head, and I was thinking I was going to have to deal with the idiot complaints that I’m a hypocrite because I despise Islam and Christianity, while we ‘social justice warriors’ are supposed to love Islam more and make excuses for the atrocities perpetrated in its name.

Which, when I put it that way, is so patently stupid that I shouldn’t have to even address it. You can regard beheadings with horror and reject the religious justifications for it while recognizing that somebody can be Muslim and feel exactly the same way. But Marcotte spells it all out: Liberals are not soft on, sympathetic towards, or defensive about Islamic terrorism. I’ve banned a surprising number of people this week who have barged in and triumphantly acted is if the fact that the killers in the San Bernardino were radicalized Muslims was a repudiation of the idea that we should regard Muslims as human beings.

This has gone on long enough. It’s time to say it straight: Just because conservatives believe there’s some kind of global battle between Christianity and Islam doesn’t mean that liberals have to agree, much less that they take the “Islam” side of that equation. On the contrary, most liberals see fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam as categorically the same and categorically illiberal in their shared opposition to feminism and modernity.

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Fire all these “journalists”

Shameful. Disgraceful. Unprofessional. Repellent. That’s my opinion of our media vultures.

A mob of idiots with cameras rushed into the apartment of the San Bernardino killers, and went on air vapidly commenting on the mundane crap they found. Oh, look: they have a calendar on the wall. The dullard back in the studio wants to know what kind of computer they have. Here’s an uncashed check for $7.98. Let’s go rifle through the child’s toy box.

Fucking christ. These are not journalists, or reporters, or even rational human beings. They are poison on the profession. Fire every single one of the people milling about in that apartment, the studio nitwits giving them advice, and the network executives who approved this mess. They should be embarrassed.

I have kept the cable and broadcast news off for the last few days, because this is what I expect from them.

The naturalistic fallacy strikes again!

coconut

Cool story, bro. NPR tells us about an unfortunate gentleman who decided to live naked and on a natural food — a single natural food — on an idyllic tropical island in the remote Pacific. The last part sounds nice, but the rest is a bit loony, especially his diet, which consisted exclusively of coconuts, and it led to slow death by malnutrition and disease of the man and his followers (he had followers!).

What particularly struck me, though, is the logic of his choices. Guess who is blamed?

Born in Nuremberg in 1875, August Engelhardt was among the disaffected youngsters drawn to the back-to-nature Lebensreform (Life Reform) movement sweeping through Germany and Switzerland at the time. Its proponents yearned after an unspoiled Eden where people ate vegetables and raw food.

Engelhardt was especially taken by Gustav Schlickeysen’s 1877 dietary treatise, Fruit and Bread: A Scientific Diet. Influenced by Darwinism, the book claimed that since the natural food of apes was uncooked food and grain, that was also “the proper food for man.”

Poor old Chuck. Racism, capitalism, libertarianism, and now coconut diets are all his fault.

There is a faint hint of validity to Engelhardt’s ideas, though. We certainly are adapted to our environments as a consequence of our past history, and it would have some explanatory power and would possibly be helpful to consider what our ancestors lived on. There are at least two problems here, though.

  • Too often, people make unsupported assumptions about that history, and base their decision not on the actual evolution and biology of the species, but on some bizarre fantasy. I rather doubt that ancient humans were subsisting on a coconut diet which conferred resistance to malaria on them…that part was entirely made up by Engelhardt.

  • We have to recognize that many of us are living in radically novel conditions now. We did not evolve to live to the age of 50 and older — I am an unnatural creature. My ancestors didn’t die of atherosclerosis, because they could wolf down all the BBQ mammoth they wanted, without increasing their natural rates of mortality, which were largely caused by infectious disease and injury.

I feel the same way every time I hear nonsense about the Paleo Diet, or whatever other pseudo-scientific fad sweeping the country. These tend to be diets contrived by people who know nothing about paleolithic peoples or environments, and even if they were genuinely based on real information, might be excellent for people who are expected to die before they hit 30.

My daughter’s contribution to world peace

My daughter, Skatje, was having a semi-public discussion with my niece, Rachael, about making lefse, and she shared her recipe. I have stolen it and now post it publicly, because the world — nay, the universe — needs this information. Use it wisely.

lefse1

8 cups riced potatoes (a 5lb bag should cover it)
3-4 cups flour (depending on wetness of the potatoes; aim for as little flour as you can get away with without being too sticky. Don’t overcook the potatoes or they’re just gonna be a mushy wet mess)
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup heavy cream
1tbsp salt

(This is definitely more lefse than the posted recipe is for, but who doesn’t want more lefse?)

But for the past several years I do a vegan version that you would never guess is vegan and everyone seems to be a huge fan of. For that, I substitute the butter for Earth Balance margarine. For the heavy cream, I take a 1/2 measuring cup, fill it a little more than half full of cashew milk and then add margarine until it fills up to the top.

As far as directions: Boil potatoes for around an hour (until they seem that mashable level where you can stick a fork in really easily). Drain, stick in fridge until tolerable temperature to work with. Rice them (pack down the measuring cups for that) and mix in everything but the flour. Refrigerate again until good and proper cold (like overnight). Add the flour until it’s not very sticky. Put back in fridge until cold cold cold.

My current setup for rolling it is great but often you have to work with a less ideal setup. I have the rolling space on the counter in the front (kept well-floured), the grill to my left, and the fridge on my right. I keep the dough in the freezer during it. Just reaching in and grabbing a small handful each time. I can roll out this whole batch in about 45 minutes. Flour the board/table, roll roll roll a bunch, flip, scatter some flour on top, roll roll roll, lift up with stick and shake as much flour off as possible before putting on grill. If you get quick enough, it’ll be time to flip the one you’re rolling at the same time as you need to flip the one that’s on the grill.

But the unideal setup is where you have to roll it out somewhere a good ways away from the fridge. In this case it may be sensible to do it in batches where you take a break to chill the dough back down again. Cold temperature is key for getting it not too sticky to roll and not needing so much flour so that the taste becomes more of a sad flour-y flatbread than delicious soft potato-y lefse.

Tools are important too. You need one of those weird grooved rolling pins. I’ve made a lot of lefse without a cloth rolling board, but can hands down say that that is SO necessarily to get paper thin lefse and overall makes things less of a pain in the ass with it shrinking or sticking to the table underneath. You need some sort of grill/skillet thing that can get up to 500 degrees. If someone tells you to oil said skillet (as this recipe does), that person needs to be cooked until lightly brown on each side.

Lefse is a holiday tradition in my family. My grandmother would make huge quantities every fall, and share them out to everyone. I used to make it for my kids, but it was never as good as my grandmother’s, and I wasn’t consciously aware of a lot of the information above, so my results were inconsistent. Skatje has, through practice and the inheritance of family tradition, become the Zen Master of Lefse, the Lefse Buffy, and everyone should heed her words. Especially the bit about cooking anyone who tries to fry their lefse. Ewww.