OOOOOOOFFFFEENNNNSSIIIIIIIVVVE!

Against my advice, the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers ran an incredibly offensive ad on city buses in De Moines featuring naked lesbians masturbating with Bibles.

No, wait, that wasn’t it. It was an ad announcing that god hated Christians and they were all going to burn in hell.

No, I don’t think that was it. It was an ad offering free bacon to anyone willing to deny the Holy Spirit, and the Iowa vegans were outraged.

Nah, don’t think so. Actually, the horrible, awful, evil ad they were running was this one:

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That’s it? “Don’t believe in God? You aren’t alone”? That’s the ad that some people found offensive? So offensive that the ad was promptly yanked from city buses, and Governor Chet Culver announced that he was “disturbed, personally” by them?

That’s insane. What’s the matter with those Iowans? One day they do something to make us proud, the next they do something so petty and stupid.

Look, it’s a clear case. There was absolutely nothing offensive about those ads, nothing that would make the horses skittish or frighten the children. Somewhere down the line, a few intolerant ignoramuses freaked out and started phoning the bus company, and a coward or a zealot somewhere in the chain of command saw an excuse to shut down a harmless advertisement. It’s bigotry, plain and simple.

By the way, there’s also a poll:

Do you think it was right for DART to remove the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers ads from its busses?

Yes
21.6%
No
78.4%

It’s going the right way, at least…but could be better.

Warm-up for the Creation “Museum”

The big field trip to Ken Ham’s amusement park is on Friday morning — we’ll be meeting at 10am at the parking lot, just look for the mob.

Be ready. This is exactly what you can expect if any of the creationists engage with you.

Expect them to be smug in their ignorance, and recite the same old tripe they always do. But remember: don’t get angry, just be amused. We are not going there for a rumble, this is a reconnaissance mission, in which we will harvest many stories.

I have another request: anyone who is joining us for this event who is also a biologist, please email me. I’d like to coordinate a little bit and make sure we’re well distributed in the group — there are a lot of people going, and we won’t be able to troop through in one big mass.

If you aren’t going, I will be twittering away on my iPhone as we go through, so you can follow along vicariously. I’ll use the hashtag #CreoZerg, and welcome any other twittering attendees to use it, too.

People are worried that there won’t be pictures. I just charged up FOUR batteries for my Nikon D50; I’m bringing my iPhone with its camera; I will have my Flip camera; and I’m thinking about bringing my digital video camera (although I may not, since it’s feeling like overkill so far). I’m sure others will be doing likewise. The press will be there. There will be photos, do not fear.

This is what real militants do

We uppity obnoxious “New Atheists” often get called “militant” or “rabid” or even “fundamentalist”, and unless you’re doing it as a joke, it’s highly inappropriate. Real rabid radicals do things like these animal rights lunatics, who have targeted the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, setting fire to his vacation home and stealing his mother’s ashes from her gravesite. Now that is unconscionable and damaging behavior.

The site also has a poll, if you’ve been pining away for one lately. Maybe you can express how the actions of the real militants make you feel.

Animal research:

Is necessary
43%
Should be abolished
57%

It definitely needs some correction.

Another mass murder

As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, a deranged gunman went on a shooting spree in a fitness club in LA, killing 3 women and injuring 10 before blowing his own scabrous, rotting brains out. The guy was just plain nuts (in a fairly common sort of way, unfortunately), but he also left behind an online diary.

Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter. I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them.

Say, that logic looks rather familiar, doesn’t it?

What to expect when you hire a Goon Squad

One of the many disgraceful acts of brigandage our country committed in Iraq was the hiring of mercenary thugs through a company called Blackwater. Unwilling to risk the political fallout from openly discussing and recruiting the number of soldiers necessary to actually carry out their grand plans for invading another country, the previous administration instead threw buckets of money at Halliburton-KBR and outsourced the military to profit-seeking, murderous killers-for-hire who did more to harm than help the war effort. As we ought to have expected, the Blackwater unsavoriness is getting even uglier.

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

These bastards fit right in with the Bush administration, didn’t they? These monsters need to be shut down now, and I hope the Obama administration has the steel to do it.

Briefed on the substance of these allegations by The Nation, Congressman Dennis Kucinich replied, “If these allegations are true, Blackwater has been a criminal enterprise defrauding taxpayers and murdering innocent civilians.” Kucinich is on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and has been investigating Prince and Blackwater since 2004.

“Blackwater is a law unto itself, both internationally and domestically. The question is why they operated with impunity. In addition to Blackwater, we should be questioning their patrons in the previous administration who funded and employed this organization. Blackwater wouldn’t exist without federal patronage; these allegations should be thoroughly investigated,” Kucinich said.

Gene regulatory networks and conserved noncoding elements

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We miss something important when we just look at the genome as a string of nucleotides with scattered bits that will get translated into proteins — we miss the fact that the genome is a dynamically modified and expressed sequence, with patterns of activity in the living cell that are not readily discerned in a simple series of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs. What we can’t see very well are gene regulatory networks (GRNs), the interlinked sets of genes that are regulated in a coordinated fashion in cells and tissues.

[Read more…]

Graduating from shark-jumping to professional synchronized shark wrestling

The birthers are getting even more insane. They’ve trotted out a faked Kenyan birth certificate for Obama, which was predictable and stupid; their media representative, Orly Taitz, had a public meltdown (and seriously, you know you’ve got credibility problems when your media face is a lunatic like Taitz); and now, best and looniest of all, they’re going ape over an exercise in dubious etymology, in which some kook claims the Bible gives the name of the anti-Christ, or Satan: Baraq Ubamah. No, it doesn’t actually say that, but if you pick one phrase that was written in Greek and use a Hebrew or Aramaic dictionary to translate individual words, you might be able to pretend that Jesus said that was Satan’s name.

I cannot believe anyone takes these wackaloons seriously.

Anyway, MarkChu-Carroll takes a flamethrower to the abuse of Hebrew, and determines that if we play the same sort of game with his name, he must be the anti-christ. Well, maybe—but I think that we can resolve which one must be the True Anti-Christ with one simple question: which one did PZ Myers vote for in the last election?