A cup of coffee, and the haka.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
A cup of coffee, and the haka.
Grading. Grading grading grading. Grading grading grading grading, grading grading grading. Grading.
He was a mechanic, and his hobby was drawing and painting, so Renaissance paintings recreated with auto mechanics would have been perfect.
Although he’d probably be saying all these guys need a shave and a haircut.
Sweden had a mass murder attempt and school killing! The killer, Anton Lundin-Pettersson, walked into a school with a sword and managed to kill two people and wound another two. If only he’d been armed with rifles and handguns, he might have gotten a better score.
Horrible as this person was (he was shot by the Swedish police), he has another distinction: he’s another godless heathen. In fact, his favorite youtuber seems to have been that lovely fellow, The Amazing Atheist.
Indeed, it’s telling that the Trollhattan killer’s favorite YouTuber (if the account attributed to him is really his) was the noxious rager who calls himself TheAmazingAtheist. Lundin-Pettersson subscribed not only to TAA’s main channel but to his personal channel as well, and he favorited dozens if not hundreds of TAA’s videos (I stopped counting). Unlike some atheist activists, TAA doesn’t devote much time to trashing Islam; he’s far more interested in bashing Anita Sarkeesian and other supposed SJWs.
But TAA affects a hyperbolic “mad as hell” persona that, despite its obvious theatricality, seems to be rooted in a good deal of real anger. I can barely make it through a single video of his, and can only imagine the corrosive effect that watching dozens of his rage-filled videos would have on someone’s soul.
Remember when we used to tell ourselves that atheists were such mild, harmless people, unlike those religious fanatics? It was quite a long time ago — maybe a whole year or two — so it might be understandable if you’d forgotten.
Don’t worry! I’m sure someone will be along soon to explain that he couldn’t have been a True Atheist™ because he once babbled something about spirituality or linked to an Asatru web page, or because he was ideologically fascist or whatever excuse someone can come up with — odds on favorite is that he might have been an atheist, but he was “mentally ill”. One thing I’ve learned is that atheists are getting really good at padding the statistics, but somehow the tally always manages to exclude the bad people.
Paul Kix explains the essence of the Midwest — he starts with the inevitable discussion of the movie Fargo, which is how most outsiders are exposed to our exotic inscrutable ways.
What Fargo nails, in other words, is Midwestern Nice, the idiosyncrasies of a steadfast populace that appear banal and maybe even bovine to the uninitiated, but in truth constitute the most sincere, malicious, enriching, and suffocating set of behaviors found in the English-speaking world.
Read the whole thing. I’ve been living here for 15 years now, and I’m only sufficiently familiar with the culture to be simultaneously entranced and horrified. It’s even: I sometimes seem to shock the natives with my blunt and awkward ways, too.
To be fair, though, at least I had a transition. My mother was born in Minnesota, and her family were all tried and true Scandinavian Minnesotans, so I moved here as a sort of mongrel Midwestern/Western hybrid. I also see a lot of my mother in that essay: she’d never say an unkind word about anybody, and tends to be quiet rather than snarky. Not that she’s unaware, though — she always knows exactly what’s going on.
The whole dang conference is available in one giant 8 hour video, and here it is.
That’s kind of indigestibly huge, so I’ve been going at it in small pieces. I started with Gabrielle Winters at about 5 hours in, with Cephalopod Neurogenomics: Insights into the Evolution of Complex Brains, just because that’s what I’m most interested in. It’s a conference for general audiences, so it starts off with a good basic overview of cephalopods and neuroscience and molecular biology, and then, just as it starts getting interesting, the sound cuts out at 15 minutes…and doesn’t resume for another 15 minutes. Aaargh. You’ll have to get the sense of it from the slide text, and I guess I’ll have to wait for the paper.
I did get the take home message, though: cephalopods have evolved complex brains independently of ours, and the answer to this question is…
No. Cephalopods have evolved novel molecular mechanisms to solve problems in learning and memory similar to ours, which is actually kind of cool. Convergent evolution may lead to similar outcomes, but looking at the underlying mechanisms will expose the different evolutionary histories.
I’ll work through other talks as my time allows — it’s actually rather nice to have a day long conference available so I can just fit it to my schedule — but hey, if you’ve got a quiet weekend, go ahead and watch the whole thing.
Chaos rules! Lincoln Chafee has quit the race!
Don’t panic. We’ll extract something out of this shambles eventually.
Rather than running major political parties? This story made me yearn for more harmlessly flamboyant goofballs.
Simon Parkes, who until April was a Labour town councillor for Whitby in North Yorkshire, claimed “psychopathic” members of a group of world leaders, known as the Illuminati by conspiracy theorists, were hellbent on using the huge atom colliding machine to open a vortex that would allow them complete control over all of us.
Don’t worry. Mr Parkes stopped the Illuminati from conquering the world with the LHC…by meditating. I know, you were worried.
But this is the story I want to hear more about.
Mr Parkes, who has earlier made national headlines after saying his mother was alien, and he lost his virginity to one, was the key speaker of the event organised by the UFO Academy at High Elms Manor in Watford, Hertfordshire.
Oh, please. Do tell.
Also, I have a secret. I do love a good media non sequitur.
In Confessions of an Alien Abductee, Parkes, who is also a qualified driving instructor, said he had an alien family with an extra-terrestrial lover.
I knew there was something discombobulating about always driving on the wrong side of the road.
The true meaning is at last revealed. I watched bits and pieces of Clinton’s hearing yesterday, and it all became clear.
Years ago, undercover operatives within the Republican party exploited a tragic, deadly attack in Libya. They stirred up some of the dumbest people in the party with a story: Benghazi is in a foreign country, and everyone knows that the Secretary of State is in charge of the foreigns, and so master manipulator Hillary Clinton must have done sumfin’ to rile up the brown people. And then all the dumb people started howling “Benghazi!”, further derailing their party, and getting the people who howled loudest into prominent positions, and sucking up millions of dollars for an “investigation”.
And then they put a guy with a funny name and an even goofier haircut in charge of the whole thing, and every third-rate sour, bitter Republican they could on the committee, and they staged a show trial in which posturing clowns asked stupid questions and Hillary Clinton could demonstrate god-like patience and look like the only grown-up in Washington DC.
It was brilliant. The Republicans look like twits, while Hillary Clinton looked presidential. It was the Kennedy-Nixon debate all over again, with Clinton as the telegenic, good-looking one, and the entire Republican party looking thuggish.
I heard the siren song. I found myself thinking that maybe I should vote for Clinton, too — never mind that Sanders is closer to me politically, man, I could picture President Hillary Clinton so easily.
And in case you missed it all, here is a most accurately abbreviated transcription of the whole thing.
