Under a Gibbous Moon

I got a fair amount of hate for my Atheism as a religion post. Not one to leave well enough alone, I came upon this article. In part, it reads:

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

It’s an interesting read, though much of it I covered all ready, though his has bigger words. So, to all you Atheists out there, remember: You’re hate just proves us right.

In Turkey, an archeological team found an ancient temple. How old? It is estimated to be seven thousand years older than Stonehenge. That puts it somewhere around 9500 B.C.

That’s pretty much before the start of human civilization. Let’s see an inexplicably old temple in the middle of nowhere. It sounds kinda familiar.

I wonder if the Predators are here yet?

Now all we need is a ill billionaire to lead an expedition inside. I wonder is Steve Jobs is available.

Disgusting but true. Bed bugs have a pheromone that lets males know that they have, uh, “mounted” the wrong gender. Bed bugs, it seems reproduce via traumatic copulation, wherein the male uses his needle like penis to punch a whole into the females chest and then ejaculates into them. Suddenly, Alien seems less creepy.

Researchers were able to block the glad that produced this (why?) and found that males would then mount other males and proceed to stab them to death with there penises.

I can just see the lab now:

“Doctor, when we blocked up those glands, the males started to impale each other with their penises.”

“Hmmm, interesting, let’s run more tests, just to be sure.”

And people get up in arms when they test shampoo on dogs.

Finally, in the comments on the first article, this related comic was linked to. Try to not be drinking anything when you read it.

A recent Slate article, nicely titled Buy local, act evil, talks about a recent Psychology Science paper that concluded that people who made eco-friendly purchases were less altruistic and more likely to cheat and steal.

It then goes into a bunch of complicated and competing theories that essentially amount to people being good so they can be bad. I find that to be general bullshit. Oddly enough, the author basically hits it on the head in the last paragraph:

A decade or two ago, buying green products and other environmentalist measures might have just seemed idiosyncratic. Now such conduct is widely lauded…

Exactly, it has become the “thing” to do. Even more so, it has become a form of conspicuous consumption. When you start buy a dozen organic, free range brown eggs for $5 you’ve graduated to showing off. Which is not to say that everyone who spends money on such products is an asshole, merely that assholes tend to gravitate toward such trends.

It’s not that doing good makes you feel good about being bad, just that selfish, pretentious people like to put on airs of sainthood but given the chance will rob you blind and leave you dead on the side of the road (think Wall Street).

This comes by way of Schneier on Security. A new scholarly paper from the American Journal of Forensic Medical Pathology that is cleverly titled, Use of a pig model to demonstrate vulnerability of major neck vessels to inflicted trauma from common household items.

A brief summary of this paper would be what every prisoner already knows, damn near anything can be used as a weapon in a pinch:

Commonly available items including a ball point pen, a plastic knife, a broken wine bottle, and a broken wine glass were used to inflict stab and incised wounds to the necks of 3 previously euthanized Large White pigs. With relative ease, these items could be inserted into the necks of the pigs next to the jugular veins and carotid arteries.

Now the biggest problem that I see with this is that the TSA will see this as a security hole that needs to be plugged as opposed to showing the futility of banned random crap. I’m afraid that this paper will cause us to all be flying naked soon.