Global Warming Is No Threat to the Planet; What Will Die Is Human Civilization

Divine Irony

Wonder

Divine Irony:

doinggoodwithoutagod:

https://m.facebook.com/MICHAELSHERLOCK.AUTHORM

Masterpiece

Divine Irony:

Every living thing is a masterpiece, written by nature and edited by evolution.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
(via oedameux)
(Source: harmonyoftheworlds)

The Blindness of Denial

When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

(via blackatheists)

Total Lunar Eclipse Tuesday 3 a.m., Clouds Be Fucked

Seriously, wake up your kids and make them see this.  If you're lucky, they'll grow up to be Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

James Bruggers at the Courier:

In any event, whether we can see it or not, there will be a total lunar eclipse that is predicted to have a reddish color from atmospheric conditions and scattered light, according to experts at the University of Louisville. They're calling it a blood moon.
Tom Tretter, associate professor of science education in U of L's College of Education and Human Development, had this to saw about the eclipse:

In the Louisville area the total eclipse (when the moon is fully in Earth's shadow) will begin at about 3:07 a.m. Tuesday morning. It will last until 4:25 a.m. Unlike a solar eclipse, it is quite safe to view a lunar eclipse with bare eyes or even binoculars or small telescopes. Plus, it is clearly visible even with city light pollution, so you don't have to find a dark viewing spot.

The entire event may be visible from North and South America, according to NASA. And of the clouds get in the way, there's always the Internet. You can watch the eclipse live on the NASA website, with coverage starting at 1 a.m. NASA is also providing a central location for people to share their photos. All that can be found, here.

"more poetry in a chunk of quartzite"

Like so many others, my introduction to Abbey was The Monkey Wrench Gang, but if that's all you've read of him, you've missed the best.
Chris Clarke at Pharyngula:

A quote from Ed Abbey, who died 24 years ago today

The geologic approach is certainly primary and fundamental, underlying the attitude and outlook that best support all others, including the insights of poetry and the wisdom of religion. Just as the earth itself forms the indispensable ground for the only kind of life we know, providing the sole sustenance of our minds and bodies, so does empirical truth constitute the foundation of higher truths. (If there is such a thing as higher truth.)

It seems to me that Keats was wrong when he asked, rhetorically, “Do not all charms fly … at the mere touch of cold philosophy?” The word “philosophy” standing, in his day, for what we now call “physical science.” But Keats was wrong, I say, because there is more charm in one “mere” fact, confirmed by test and observation, linked to other facts through coherent theory into a rational system, than in a whole brainful of fancy and fantasy. I see more poetry in a chunk of quartzite than in a make-believe wood nymph, more beauty in the revelations of a verifiable intellectual construction than in whole misty empires of obsolete mythology.

The moral I labor toward is that a landscape as splendid as that of the Colorado Plateau can best be understood and given human significance by poets who have their feet planted in concrete — concrete data — and by scientists whose heads and hearts have not lost the capacity for wonder. Any good poet, in our age at least, must begin with the scientific view of the world; and any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet, must possess the ability to communicate to the rest of us his sense of love and wonder at what his work discovers.

Justice For the RIch, But Not On Them

If a homeless person cut down just one of those trees to build a lean-to and make a small fire, that person would be in prison for the rest of his life.

Why is Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder walking free?

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Rain makes trees grow, but only if they're planted. This new book asserts that after chopping down public-easement trees to improve his mansion's view of the Potomac River, Chainsaw Dan Snyder tried to ruin the career of the National Park Service ranger who blew the whistle. Click "media kit" for a summary of the allegations. Your columnist has no way of knowing whether the book's charges are true. It is known that a 2006 federal report found Snyder had "undue influence" at the Park Service.

The clear-cutting happened in 2004. After being caught, Chainsaw Dan promised to replant. Seven years later, no new trees. Since saplings take a decade to acquire height, years of putting off the replanting assured Chainsaw Dan of a long period of unobstructed view. If an average person cut down Park Service trees, there would be immediate retribution. When a wealthy person does the same, the government goes lapdog.

If you want to know how we got to this point, read Glenn Greenwald's "With Liberty and Justice for Some."

Careful With That "Natural" Claim

Freakazoids keep using that word. It doesn't mean what they think it means.

PZ Myers:

David Barton is a guy who makes a living lying about history…and now apparently he wants to add lying about science to his résumé. Here he argues that abortion and homosexuality are wrong because they are aberrations of nature.

The stupid burns white hot in that one.

1. It’s the naturalistic fallacy. You can’t derive what humans ought to do from what other animals do (and worse, what you imagine in your ignorance that other animals do). Other animals don’t worship the Bible or pray; therefore, it is wrong for humans to do so. At least, that’s the reasonable conclusion for Barton’s logic. We’ll also have to shed hats and shoes, stop cooking our food, and Barton will have to stop doing his clown act on TV…all human behaviors that are not shared with other animals.

2. It is simply not true that other animals don’t abort their young. Look at the Bruce effect; rodents will spontaneously terminate their pregnancies if exposed to a strange male. Lots of animals will spontaneously abort under stress, and it makes evolutionary sense: evolution, unlike fundamentalist Christians, favors the preservation of maternal life. It is wiser for a female to conserve her resources and bear offspring when she can afford the cost.

You want real horror stories? Look up maternal infanticide. It’s a continuation of that same evolutionary logic: if infants cost resources, and if the choice has to be made between preserving the life of the infant vs. the life of the mother (and usually, death of the mother leads to death of the infant anyway), animals will sacrifice the young first. It’s been seen in rodents, penguins, pigs, foxes, tamarins, you name it. It’s often even accompanied by cannibalism. If Barton wants to draw moral lessons for humanity from the animal kingdom, there you go.

3. Homosexuality is also common (here’s a list). Barton is making the common fundie Christian error, thinking sex is for reproduction and only for reproduction. As anyone with any sense knows, though, in humans and many other animals, sex is primarily for social bonding. Almost every single sexual activity in which you participate, even if it is with a member of the complementary sex in permanent relationship, is for fun and because it strengthens the relationship.

When you look at it that way, what’s surprising is how little homosexuality is going on — why are businessmen settling for a handshake and a golf game when they could really seal the deal? But then of course there are other factors, like maintaining some exclusivity of special relationships and the importance of distancing as well as intimacy in different classes of social behaviors. But you simply cannot make the blanket argument that homosexuality is unsupportable by evolution.

Also, because it’s the explanation I favor, not everything in evolution is finely tuned for optimal reproductive efficiency. I think homosexuality is common because evolution favors sexual behaviors first, and adding restrictions to limit sexual behavior to reproductive behavior a distant second.

Unfortunately, lying for favors and obstinately clinging to ignorance are typically human behaviors, too, so I can’t slam Barton with the argument that he’s an aberration.

It's the same old freakazoid bullshit: "everybody has to do only what I tell them to do." They use any false authority - nature, bible myths, their morning shit - to justify it.

Our Un-Natural World

National Geographic's Age of Man:

It’s a new name for a new geologic epoch—one defined by our own massive impact on the planet. That mark will endure in the geologic record long after our cities have crumbled.

Incredible photographs. So un-natural you have to read the description to make sense of them.

h/t Page One Kentucky.

What Bigots Don't Understand About What's Natural

Hilzoy has a great piece on the pope's latest bigotry-based rant about what's "natural."

More to the point: so what? Lots of things that we find immoral are widespread in nature. Spiders eat their mates, for instance, but that doesn't imply that it's OK for us. Lots of things we think are just fine are unknown in animals -- number theory, for instance, or blogging. If you want to argue about what we learn when we "listen to the language of creation", you need to explain how we distinguish it from, say, the language of prejudice. Does the fact that the purpose of eating seems to be nourishment imply that it is immoral to drink diet soda? Does the fact that we 'naturally' get around using our legs imply that we were wrong to invent the bicycle, or, for that matter, the wheelchair? Does the fact that we are born vulnerable to a whole host of diseases mean that we should not develop vaccines and cures?

Personally, I think that the idea of defining what's "natural" for human beings is generally confused. What's natural is often contrasted to what's cultural, but human beings are social animals. If anything is natural for human beings, it is being raised by other human beings, and learning things from them: if we tried to find out what's 'natural' for human beings by dropping an infant into an unpopulated wilderness, we'd have to conclude that what comes naturally to us is starvation.

One sign that someone is not so much as trying to listen to the voice of creation is getting obviously relevant facts about nature wrong, say by asserting that animals do not form homosexual relationships or change sex. Another is making claims about what's natural without any apparent awareness that someone might find his life unnatural -- say, if he had taken a vow of celibacy, and lectured other people about the unnaturalness of their sexual lives without any trace of irony.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....