All the gay news

Posted on May 28, 2010 by Michael

Or at least some of the latest updates:

  • Bigots suffered a set back recently when it was ruled they had to disclose the names of their fellow bigots who contributed to bigotry in Maine last year. Now a federal judge has issued a block.
  • Bigots are being challenged in Massachusetts. It is being argued by non-bigots that DOMA is a violation of state rights. I find this argument interesting the same people arguing against this are the ones who argue for the expansion of state rights in regards to brown people in Arizona. But the difference is obvious: marriage is to be regulated by the states; immigration is federal. Of course, none of that matters to those who just hate brown and/or gay people.
  • Gay closet Republican #743,029 Roy Ashburn has compiled a stringent pro-bigot voting record in his political career. He claims he was doing it out of concern for his constituents. But now that everyone knows he likes penis (eww!!!! amirite?), he’s begun to change his stances. Crazy how that works.
  • One man in D.C. has wed 44 same-sex couples. He tried to save his eternal soul from hell by marrying a heterosexual couple, but I think God is on to him. His transgressions against the arbitrary whim of the malevolent Yahweh are definitely going to land him in hell for eternity. I mean. That’s fair.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social, Rights, Same-sex marriage | Tagged: , , | 6 Comments »

Zero tolerance policies are a failure

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Michael

Zero tolerance policies are a way for many high schools and middle schools to enforce ridiculous rules. It’s basically an excuse to not have to justify anything with logic. Personally, I prefer to call it rule internalization. I’ve described many instances in the past, but I will quickly repeat a hypothetical example I’ve already given.

Say a mother tells her daughter not to throw toys. Her daughter later throws a ball around while outside. Her mother then punishes her for breaking one of her rules. This is, of course, an absurd scenario. It is clear the reason for the rule was that throwing toys can result in damage to the toys, hurt people in the process, and cause damage to furniture/items in the house. However, because the rule was stated more broadly than that, it technically applied to all scenarios, even throwing a ball outside. The girl violated the rule, but not the reason for the rule.

This is an exaggeration and unlikely to happen except in the most redneck of homes, but it illustrates the point. We’ve all faced this sort of rules-for-the-sake-of-rules attitude. It ignores both the human factor and the reason in the equation. The rule itself is undermined when it is enforced for its own sake; the point is no longer reason, but rather internalization. I would hypothesize that a study might reveal a higher degree of rule internalization among the religious as they tend to refuse to reason many of their fundamental beliefs within the constraints of logic, but the problem is spread beyond that group. Imagine walking into an airport with one of those rope mazes designed to corral long lines. Most of us are willing to look like jackasses and actually follow the path even when no other customers are present and it would be more convenient to walk around the ropes. I suspect this internalization of broad social norms reaches beyond the religious. (It’s the more narrow ethical field where the religious tend to be logically impaired.)

As it turns out, these sort of policies aren’t even effective anyway.

A number of the policies require security officials, administrators and staff take “zero tolerance” approaches in punishing students that carry weapons of any sort, or cause any event that poses a threat in classrooms.

The policies typically require automatic suspension and withdrawal of a student from a school district for at least one year as a consequence, although schools across America enforce the policy differently, researchers said.

This takes discretion out of the equation and that’s where the big problem is. School officials are forced (and probably sometimes enjoy) to blindly follow rules. It doesn’t matter that not all students are equal or that not all actions, even similar ones, should be treated equally. No. Just suspend them all, right?

I think that’s another serious flaw in these sort of policies. Why give suspensions so often? Why not sit the student down and make him read a book? Why not make Suzie Q improve her algebra grade? Taking students out of the learning process is a detriment to the very thing these policies are suppose to be helping. And it’s so obvious.

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Anti-vaccine nut gets nuts chopped

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Michael

Andrew Wakefield has helped to contribute to the death of children and the rise of a disease that was practically extinct. He did this by promoting unethical research which contributed to unfounded fears that linked autism and other diseases to vaccines. Fortunately, unlike Christopher Maloney, Wakefield’s irresponsible message about vaccines can be regulated more efficiently and effectively because he is a real doctor.

After nearly three years of formal investigation by the General Medical Council (GMC), Dr Wakefield has been found guilty of serious professional misconduct over “unethical” research that sparked unfounded fears that the vaccine was linked to bowel disease and autism.

Parents were advised yesterday that it was “never too late” to give their children the triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella, as the case drew to a close.

He has been struck off the medical register in the U.K. over his abuse of science now, but he’s still an unfortunately powerful figure. The hostility towards science demonstrated by the anti-vaccine crowd goes beyond this one quack. One can only hope this issue is big enough news to bring the vaccine rates back to their pre-Wakefield levels (they dropped near 50% for certain vaccines early in the last decade in the U.K.).

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More Facebook lies

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Michael

Facebook’s failed privacy policies are an ongoing problem for the company. Now that blogs and other media have helped to bring attention to them, Facebook has taken to lying.

In an open letter published Monday in the Washington Post (whose chairman, Donald E. Graham, just so happens to sit on Facebook’s board of directors), Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook has been “growing quickly” and admitted that “sometimes we move too fast.”

“Many of you thought our controls were too complex,” Zuckerberg’s letter reads. “Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls” — uh, you can say that again — “but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.”

Zuckerberg promised, in “coming weeks,” privacy controls that will be “much simpler to use” — including an “easy way to turn off all third-party services” that can access your account.

The concern is false. It’s a lie. The company is pretending like they’re going to vastly improve things – because any change sounds nice – but they’re going to make slight modifications which still favor the invasion of privacy by default. It may become easier to say “No, don’t take my private info”, but it’s going to remain necessary for people to go out of their way and do it. And that’s the complaint; Facebook just doesn’t get that people are mad because most users sign up with the presumption of default privacy.

Not that the owner, Zuckerberg, cares:

But Zuckerberg is also being dogged by an embarrassing IM thread from when he was a 19-year-old Harvard student, bragging that he’d gathered personal information from thousands of users for the nascent TheFacebook.com. “People just submitted it,” Zuckerberg messaged, “I don’t know why. They ‘trust me.’ Dumb [expletive].” (This comes via Silicon Alley Insider.)

Awesome.

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The most important fact about Venter’s achievement

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Michael

If not the most important fact about what Craig Venter did is not that it raises ethical questions or anything like that (the questions are overblown anyway). Instead, it’s that what he did was a massive technical feat. It’s long, long, long been known that what he did was possible in theory. Everyone expected it to work. The problem was in making it work. That side of the problem came with different expectations. Almost certainly someday, yes, we ought to be able to synthesize a genome and insert it into a cell, but today? Could Venter’s team do it successfully using such a length of base pairs? The answer is yes, but that wasn’t always clear.

While I’m at it I suppose I can point out two more huge facts: first, the organism has no parents. It was not conceived sexually or replicated asexually. It is a product of pure chemistry, and that tells us something about the cell. Second, this achievement means we can go into a computer, change a few amino acids, and come up with completely different gene products. The first application may well be for industrial use (wouldn’t it be great to produce bacteria that just love to eat up oil spills?). I suspect another major application will somehow involve cancer treatment. The creation of an enzyme which makes it more difficult for cancer to recruit blood vessels (angiogenesis) or which reduces some other product cancer brings about for its own perpetuation may be the next big revolution in the so-called “War on Cancer”.

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‘Stop trying to play God!’

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Michael

There’s a lot of empty rhetoric floating around in light of the immense achievement of Craig Venter. Most of it is coming from anti-science conservatives, as one might expect. The Catholic Church is no exception.

Another official with the Italian bishops’ conference, Bishop Domenico Mogavero, expressed concern that scientists might be tempted to play God.

“Pretending to be God and parroting his power of creation is an enormous risk that can plunge men into a barbarity,” Mogavero told newspaper La Stampa in an interview. Scientists “should never forget that there is only one creator: God.”

“In the wrong hands, today’s development can lead tomorrow to a devastating leap in the dark,” said Mogavero, who heads the conference’s legal affairs department.

What makes this interesting is that the Church keeps urging caution for where this will all lead. But if they think Venter is playing God, then we already have a good answer: it will lead to terribly designed organisms which have a lot of junk, non-sense organ routes and parts, and which are bound to the mistakes found in their ancestors – unless of course we keep failing and cause 99% of everything we create to go extinct.

Filed under: News, Religions, Science | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Christians jail gay couple

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Michael

In overwhelmingly Christian Malawi two men have been sent to prison for 14 years for being gay.

The harsh sentence was immediately deplored by human rights groups around the world, but Magistrate Nyakwawa Usiwa Usiwa, in reading his judgment, seemed adamant in his ruling. He said he was especially offended that the two lovers celebrated their relationship in public with an engagement party.

“I do not believe Malawi is ready at this point in time to see its sons getting married to other sons, or cohabitating, or conducting engagement ceremonies,” the magistrate said. “Malawi is not ready to smile at her daughters marrying each other. Let posterity judge this judgment.”

Posterity will judge this judgement precisely the same as the majority of today’s generation judges 19th century America. There is no reasonable justification for what Malawian Christians are doing to Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza – hence the use of religion to bring about yet another horrendous event in history.

The nation’s clergy have been united in condemning the gay couple. “God calls homosexuality an abomination, which is greater than a simple sin,” the Rev. Felix Zalimba, pastor of the All for Jesus Church in Blantyre, said Thursday. He said church and state were aligned in agreement: “These two must repent and ask God’s forgiveness. Otherwise, they will surely go to hell.”

Aww, that’s so sweet. I guess Malawian Christians are just looking for out the spiritual well-being of the couple.

Malawi is a welfare state that suffers from massive poverty. That poverty, as demonstrated here, goes far beyond monetary woes. And while the educational system has improved dramatically over the years, it still lags severely; it’s about what one would expect from a so-called third world nation. This presents a dilemma. Donor nations might be tempted to withdraw funds in protest of such fervent bigotry, but that would act to also cause harm to all the people who just need clean water and enough food.

I say do it.

Remove all monetary funds from the nation. Still donate food and practical goods, but force it to come up with its own cash. No nation of any common sense ought to be donating money that’s going to partially go towards funding prison operations in Malawi.

Better yet, let’s not just give direct resources; let’s also direct funding. Promote secular ideals and education. Make the nation more than 80-some percent literate; the power of the Catholic Church was long centered on the low literacy rates around the world – someone who cannot read is powerless to fight the lies of priests. The Malawian Christian tragedy is no different.

What’s really ugly about all this is just how obvious it is that religion is the fuel to this fire. This is an extension of the sort of religious fire that burns in the U.S. against gays. In Maine it took roughly a decade to make it illegal to fire someone for being gay. (‘You want to work that cash register? No, faggot!’) In most other states, it remains legal to fire based upon sexual orientation. People who hate gays want to strip them of their basic rights – and more importantly, their basic humanity. The only impediment in the U.S. to the criminalization of homosexuality is the civil libertarian strengths of the Constitution. (Not to be confused with economic libertarian strengths: no such thing exists.) Without those influencing the very cultural of America, who knows just how far the religious would take their bigotry? Perhaps a high rate of literacy would help hold back criminalization to this extreme, but it’s difficult to say. After all, a number of states have had laws which made sodomy a crime.

Another significant issue in the bigotry of Malawian Christians is the lack of separation of church and state. Without any barrier, any rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, religious dogma holds an undue sway on government. Those who are silly enough to think freedom of religion somehow doesn’t also inherently mean freedom from religion ought to reflect on the jailing of Chimbalanga and Monjeza. Their fate has in large part been dealt to them by religion and its entanglement with government.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social, Religions, Rights, Same-sex marriage | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 35 Comments »

Craig Venter wasn’t lying

Posted on May 20, 2010 by Michael

Craig Venter is a brilliant scientist who has been working tirelessly to create life in the lab. In recent years he has been really pushing that the event is getting close. It looks like he has made a huge technical step.

Craig Venter has taken yet another step towards his goal of creating synthetic life forms. He’s synthesized the genome of a microbe and then implanted that piece of DNA into a DNA-free cell of another species. And that…that thing…can grow and divide.

Anyone who has worked with DNA for more than 30 seconds can appreciate at least some of the difficulty entailed in such a feat. Most DNA falls apart after a few thousand base pairs using modern molecular techniques of replication. Even with PCR and the use of a high-grade enzyme like Taq, no one sets out to copy something too terribly long. (And depending on what the DNA is needed for, it may only be necessary to replicate a few hundred base pairs – a fairly common event.) So Venter and his team used bacteria and yeast as major components in their synthesis instead. What they created is more or less a copy of a genome of an organism that already exists, but the important aspect here is the transfer of the synthesis into the cell. That’s the major technical feat that’s going to act as the next step in Venter’s quest to create artificial life.

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Bigot gets fired

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Michael

Jonathan I. Katz is a ridiculous excuse of a human being. Here’s what he says about gay people.

Unfortunately, the victims are not only those whose reckless behavior brought death on themselves. There are many completely innocent victims, too: hemophiliacs (a substantial fraction died as a result of contaminated clotting factor), recipients of contaminated transfusions, and their spouses and children, for AIDS can be transmitted heterosexually (in America, only infrequently) and congenitally. The icy road was lined with unsuspecting innocents, who never chose to ride a motorcycle. Guilt for their deaths is on the hands of the homosexuals and intravenous drug abusers who poisoned the blood supply. These people died so the sodomites could feel good about themselves.

What of those cursed with unnatural sexual desires? Must they forever suppress these desires? Yes, but this is hardly a unique fate. Almost everyone has desires which must be suppressed. Most men and women think adulterous thoughts fairly often, and find themselves attracted to members of the opposite sex to whom they are not married. Morality requires them to suppress these desires, and most do not commit adultery, though they feel lust in their hearts. Almost everyone, at one time or another, covets another’s property. They do not steal. Many people feel great anger or intense hatred at some time in their lives. They do not kill.

I am a homophobe, and proud.

This bigot was given a prominent position within the Obama Administration, working on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. To compound Obama’s error, the guy is also a global warming denier to some extent. (“To some extent” = global warming is happening and is caused by people, but it’s somehow good for us.) A person such as this deserves to be shunned and pushed away from any prestigious position or stature – that should be obvious. In fact, it should have been obvious that such a person shouldn’t have been given any sort of distinguished label in the first place. Fortunately, at least hindsight is 20/20.

Dr. Chu has spoken with dozens of scientists and engineers as part of his work to help find solutions to stop the oil spill. Some of Professor Katz’s controversial writings have become a distraction from the critical work of addressing the oil spill. Professor Katz will no longer be involved in the Department’s efforts.

Good.

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Go fuck yourself, Tim Pawlenty

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Michael

Because some things are so obviously absurd, they don’t deserve more than a good ol’ “go fuck yourself”.

In a move likely to burnish his presidential prospects among social conservatives, Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed a bill that granted same-sex couples the same end-of-life rights as married couples. The bill, which passed the legislature last week, would have given gay partners the power to decide about how to dispose of a body and file wrongful death suits.

“Marriage – defined as between a man and woman – should remain elevated in our society at a special level, as it traditionally has been. I oppose efforts to treat domestic relationships as the equivalent of traditional marriage. Accordingly, I am opposed to this bill,” he said in his veto message.

You’re opposed to the bill because you’re a fucking bigot. That’s it. Go fuck yourself.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social, Rights, Same-sex marriage | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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