Bucha

Russian troops are retreating from the area around Kiev, and leaving behind the wreckage of war. The recently liberated town of Bucha is an example: dead civilians left in the streets, some bound up and shot. The survivors have horror stories about the brutal occupation. There are mass graves. The Russians have abandoned any pretense of civilized behavior.

At least there are also signs that the Russian invasion cost the invaders heavily, too.

Creepy ghouls

Lauren Handy is the Director of Activism for a group called Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising. She’s a fanatic. She is currently under investigation for federal civil rights offenses after blocking access to a reproductive health center, a terribly common tactic used by anti-choicers — it’s nice to see that in some places these people are being prosecuted. As part of the investigation, Handy’s home was raided, where an unpleasant surprise was uncovered.

DC Police discovered five fetuses at the home of an anti-abortion activist in Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the department has confirmed to WUSA9.

Officers responded shortly after noon to a home on the 400 block of 6th Street SE to investigate a tip about potential bio-hazard material in the residence. Once inside, they located the fetuses. The remains were collected by the D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

The home was occupied by Lauren Handy, an anti-abortion activist who was indicted along with nine others Wednesday by a federal grand jury. Handy is accused of felony conspiracy against rights for a blockade inside a D.C. abortion clinic in October 2020.

WUSA9’s camera was outside as DC Police homicide and forensic services detectives took evidence out in red biohazard bags and coolers from the rowhouse’s basement.

Two questions: where did they get the fetuses, and why? They were either rifling through the organic waste at a hospital or clinic, or they had an insider who was stealing such material. Both are illegal, and are going to lead to more people getting fired.

But why? These activists rely entirely on shock tactics to trigger disgust in citizens…but everything that is a product of surgical procedures in hospitals is going to be repulsive to ordinary people. Cancer surgery is going to produce blood and bits of excised material that no one in their right mind is going to want on display in their home, and likewise for any necessary health procedure.

You know what’s grosser than flaunting surgical byproducts in public? Being a sensationalistic professional liar who wants to make women suffer.

Friday Cephalopod: Half a billion years of making me happy

Maybe it doesn’t look like much, and maybe it’s tiny at only 1.5cm long, but this is a 522 million year old cephalopod shell, found in Newfoundland.

To be fair, the investigators are cautious, only tentatively calling it a cephalopod…but it’s an oval shell with a siphuncle. None of the squishy bits are preserved, unfortunately, but it’s enough to suggest that this is a cephalopod, especially since it’s at about the right time period predicted.

One sad thing about it is that we still feel a need to issue a disclaimer when commenting on it.

“Cephalopods are really different from other mollusks,” Vecchione said. Still, “we do know that they’re mollusks, they’re not from outer space like some people have said.”

Yeah, those assholes from the Panspermia Mafia, Wickramasinghe etc., have really tainted the public perception of cephalopods.

Shut up, Meyer, your schtick is getting old

As usual, Stephen Meyer tries to claim that only intelligence can generate information. My usual response to that is a combination of…

  • But that’s the point of contention! You can’t use your premise as evidence that your premise is true!
  • OK, smart guy, have you examined every single piece of information in the universe to back up your claim that information always comes from an intelligent source?

But this is also a very good response. We have direct, observed, experimental evidence that information can arise from non-intelligent, natural processes.

This is the thing that bugs me about Meyer. He claims to be a philosopher, yet all of his books, every long-winded one of them, rests on a logical fallacy, his unsupported claim that all information is a product of intelligent design, and that therefore all information is a product of intelligent design.

ICR has added “annoying” to their repertoire of “stupid”

…yet.

The Institute for Creation Research has a series of videos titled “That’s A Fact”, each one under 2 minutes long, with funky background music and physically painful kinetic transitions. No, really, it hurt my eyes to watch this one — the gimmick is a screen full of words in random orientations, and the camera zooms around to highlight the word the narrator says, and just the esthetics broke me. And then there’s the content…hoo boy.

For instance, here’s one titled “evolving bacteria”. For instance, in a 20 year study of E. coli…scientists looked at 40,000 generations of bacteria, and confirmed that the bacteria did not evolve into anything other than E. coli. That’s it. That’s all. Lenski set up this experiment to see bacteria evolve into a cat, didn’t see any evilution at all, and therefore proved that macroevolution is a myth. Apparently, Lenski writes all these papers that just say “Nope, still not a cat in any test tube”.

Sorry, guys, the Lenski long-term evolution experiment did not propose to evolve something other than E. coli (it would have been surprising if it did, and would have sent everyone scurrying off to rewrite the textbooks, calling evolutionary theory into question), and it did demonstrate evolutionary changes.

Hey, ICR, do you even know what the word “evolve” means?

The Giuliani crime family is doing their best to convince me that lizard people exist

I’m not saying David Icke was right, but Rudy’s son Andrew is running for governor of New York, and he too is something of a sick freak. Would you believe he’s talking about his baby daughter here?

She “made a promise to me on the first day, right? My wife was sleeping, and I’m holding her [my daughter] in my arms. And I get emotional thinking about it, but she made a promise with me. She shook my hand and I said, ‘I’m the only boyfriend till you’re 25 years old, shake hands.’

“Shook my hand. So I have changed the diapers. I have looked under the hood. She’s a woman. I’m gonna be the last guy in a long time that looks under the hood right there. But guess what? She was born a woman and she’s gonna stay a woman, it’s that simple.”

A spokesperson for Andrew Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “while Andrew does not claim to be a biologist, he can tell the difference between a male and a female.”

So he’s possessive and controlling — I hate to break the news to you, Andy ol’ boy, but in less than 16 years she’s going to be talking about boys (or maybe girls) with her friends, and pining for a prom date who isn’t her creepy old man. At some point, she’s also going to get on the internet and discover her dad was talking about peeking “under the hood” when she was 4 months old — or worse, her peers at school learn this — and you will learn about the revenge of a daughter you’ve made cringe.