Why do women menstruate?

Here's a fascinating post at Pharyngula on the puzzling question of why women menstruate:

Menstruation is a peculiar phenomenon that women go through on a roughly monthly cycle, and it’s not immediately obvious from an evolutionary standpoint why they do it. It’s wasteful — they are throwing away a substantial amount of blood and tissue. It seems hazardous; ancestrally, in a world full of predators and disease, leaving a blood trail or filling a delicate orifice with dying tissue seems like a bad idea. And as many women can tell you, it’s uncomfortable, awkward, and sometimes debilitating. So why, evolution, why?

One assumption some people might make is that that is just the way mammalian reproduction works. This isn’t true! Most mammals do not menstruate — they do not cycle their uterine linings, but instead only build up a thickened endometrium if fertilization occurs, which looks much more efficient. Of the mammals, only most primates, a few bats, and elephant shrews are among the lucky animals that menstruate, and as you can see from the phylogeny, the scattered diversity of menstruating mammals implies that the trait was not present ancestrally — we primates acquired it relatively late.

Apparently, there are various hypotheses suggested by biologists, but PZ Myers discusses a new one:

A new paper by Emera, Romero, and Wagner suggests an interesting new idea. They turn the question around: menstruation isn’t the phenomenon to be explained, decidualization, the production of a thickened endometrial lining, is the key process.

All mammals prepare a specialized membrane for embryo implantation, the difference is that most mammals exhibit triggered decidualization, where the fertilized embryo itself instigates the thickening, while most primates have spontaneous decidualization (SD), which occurs even in the absence of a fertilized embryo. You can, for instance, induce menstruation in mice. By scratching the mouse endometrium, they will go through a pseudopregnancy and build up a thickened endometrial lining that will be shed when progesterone levels drop. So the reason mice don’t menstruate isn’t that they lack a mechanism for shedding the endometrial lining…it’s that they don’t build it up in the first place unless they’re actually going to use it.

So the question is, why do humans have spontaneous decidualization?

The answer that Emera suggests is entirely evolutionary, and involves maternal-fetal conflict. The mother and fetus have an adversarial relationship: mom’s best interest is to survive pregnancy to bear children again, and so her body tries to conserve resources for the long haul. The fetus, on the other hand, benefits from wresting as much from mom as it can, sometimes to the mother’s detriment.

I won't get into the details here. You can check out Pharyngula yourself for that, if you want. But the basic idea is that menstruation is a "consequence of self-defense" - basically, a way for a woman to defend herself from her own fetus! Neat, huh?

In evolutionary terms, a woman doesn't have quite the same interests as her fetus. For the most part, yes. But not entirely so. And as Myers points out, men and women don't have identical interests - in evolutionary terms, note - either:

The maternal-fetal conflict is also a conflict between males and females: it is in the man’s reproductive interests to have his genes propagated in any one pregnancy, while it is in the woman’s reproductive interests to bail out and try again if conditions aren’t optimal for any one pregnancy. This conflict is also played out in culture, as well as genetics — pro-choice is a pro-woman strategy, anti-abortion is a pro-man position. Sometimes, politics is a reflection of an evolutionary struggle, too.

I hope I don't need to point out that this isn't about applying "good" and "bad" labels to this kind of evolutionary conflict. It just is. This is strictly a matter of biology, of differing interests in an evolutionary sense. If this hypothesis is confirmed through additional research, it will just explain why women menstruate, nothing more.

But it's a neat idea, isn't it?

Hitchling

First, there was "hitchslap," and now there's "hitchling," a new word, suggested by Anne Crumpacker, accepted into the Urban Dictionary:

1. hitchling

noun

a child void of religious indoctrination who is encouraged to read broadly and to seek the truth unapologetically

(In memoriam of Christopher Hitchens)

Her parents are skeptics, so they are raising her as a hitchling.

Note that Crumpacker's daughter, Mason, is the hitchling who caused such a stir at the Texas Freethought Convention in October.

QOTD: Ross Douthat, gravedigger

Quote of the Day:

For the sheer magnitude of its horsepucky, this column may well stand forever. Generations yet unborn will come and read it, just to stare out of the magnificent vista of presumption, self-regard, and tinpot piety the way people bring their children to look at the Grand Canyon. It takes an unusual amount of juice-box hubris to put your thoughts in a dead man's head. It takes towering presumption to put into a dead man's head your thoughts with which he would scabrously disagree. Here, we have a New York Times columnist, a god-bothering newsboy on his best day, presuming to think — let alone speak — for a guy who is no longer here to think or speak for himself. Ross Douthat now stands as the Pope Stephen VII of letters, digging up the recently deceased and putting his corpse on trial in Douthat's own, Colorforms version of the Cadaver Synod. I guess we can be grateful that Douthat only gums away futilely at his argument. Stephen threw the convicted remains of Pope Formosus into the Tiber. Douthat just tosses Christopher Hitchens's corpse into the shallow end of his intellect. - Charles P. Pierce

Evangelical porn addict responsible for Lowes action

This is a followup to that video clip I originally posted from The Daily Show, about Lowes pulling their advertising from the "reality TV" show All-American Muslim, because of the complaints by some Christian loons that the show "advances Islamic fundamentalism."

How does it advance Islamic fundamentalism? Well, by not being a show about Islamic fundamentalism, of course. Heh, heh. Seriously, that seemed to be the whole argument.

So I thought this was pretty funny. It looks into the background of David Caton, the founder of the Florida Family Association and the instigator of that complaint.

Somehow, I'm not too surprised to hear that he's a porn addict. Excuse me, former porn addict. After all, he clearly has a screw loose somewhere.

Cenk and Ana are right. These people who are so concerned about your moral life generally have issues in their own. Generally speaking, they're just overcompensating for their own weaknesses and perceived failures by trying to dictate to others.

The end of the Iraq War

(John Cole)

Unfortunately, David Emanuel Hickman wasn't greeted with flowers when he came home.

Or maybe he was:

Hickman, 23, was killed in Baghdad by a roadside bomb that ripped through his armored truck Nov. 14 — eight years, seven months and 25 days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq began.

He was the 4,474th member of the U.S. military to die in the war, according to the Pentagon.

And he may have been the last.

With the final U.S. combat troops crossing out of Iraq into Kuwait, those who held Hickman dear are struggling to come to terms with the particular poignancy of his fate. As the unpopular war that claimed his life quietly rumbles to a close, you can hear within his inner circle echoes of John F. Kerry’s famous 1971 congressional testimony on Vietnam:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

It was quite a mistake, too. Not just 4,474 young Americans dead, but nearly 32,000 injured, often horribly - maimed, burned, and disfigured, with brain injuries, amputations, castrations, and other terrible, terrible injuries. (Modern medicine is so good these days that soldiers with truly horrific injuries can still survive the experience.)

Not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead - men, women, and children. And trillions of dollars wasted (direct and indirect costs, including caring for our injured soldiers). And now, every nation in the world has seen the danger of an out-of-control America and how, if Saddam Hussein really had developed nuclear weapons, we would have left him alone, as we do North Korea.

That's certainly a lesson Iran has taken to heart!

(David E. Hickman, 23 - photo by Zack Zornes)

No senior Iraqi government officials even showed up at our exit ceremony. But Iran was cheering wildly. After all, we took out Iran's worst enemy and ended the rule of Sunni Muslims in Iraq, giving control to the majority Shiites - like Iran's leaders. The funny thing is that Saddam Hussein, as a secular Muslim leader, was also the enemy of al-Qaeda.

Yeah, crazy isn't it? We took out the enemy of both of our enemies in the region. And why? Iraq was no threat to us. Iraq had never attacked us and, obviously, would never have dared to do so.

Even clear back in 1990, before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he checked with the American ambassador first, to make sure we'd be OK with that. Imagine his dismay when those assurances turned out to be worthless! That was the first President Bush.

At any rate, we'd still maintained a no-fly zone over Iraq since that war. And the United Nations was continuing to inspect for "weapons of mass destruction." Even if Saddam Hussein still had such things (he didn't), why not let the UN do its job? After all, we were already bogged down in one unnecessary war, one that we might have been able to win, if we hadn't taken our eye off the ball.

The whole thing was just completely insane! But the Bush administration was faith-based. They believed what they wanted to believe, just like Republican leaders now. They sneered at the "elites" who actually knew something about the Middle East. And Iraq's oil wealth was very seductive, especially since our president and vice-president were both former oil executives. Remember how the war was supposed to "pay for itself"?

Did we invade Iraq to steal their oil? I doubt it. I think it was more a matter of right-wing ideologues, chickenhawks almost to a man, believing what they really wanted to believe. They loved war - as long as there was no danger of them or theirs having to fight and die in it - but Afghanistan was just too boring. It was so primitive there were no good targets for our high-tech weapons.

They wanted to find an excuse to invade Iraq. They believed we'd be greeted as liberators, because that's what they wanted to believe. They believed the war would somehow "pay for itself," because that's what they wanted to believe. (Well, they believed that cutting taxes on the rich would pay for itself, too, for the exact same reason. When you're faith-based, you tend to believe whatever you want.)

(Pat Oliphant)

And now, Republicans are clamoring for war with Iran. Well, that's the other thing about faith-based thinking - you don't learn from your mistakes. Evidence isn't important, only faith. And when you know you're right, when you're absolutely certain that you've got God and the right on your side, then you'll keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

After all, your dogma just can't be wrong, right?

Here we go again...

(Tom Toles)

(Adam Zyglis)

(John de Rosier)

(Drew Sheneman)

(Jack Ohman)

(Nick Anderson)

Gingrich plans to arrest judges he disagrees with

From Reuters:

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich threatened on Sunday to have U.S. judges arrested if they disagreed with his policies as president [my emphasis], ratcheting up his attacks on the judiciary as he tries to halt a slide in his campaign.

"I got into this originally because of two things: the steady encroachment of secularism through the courts to redefine America as a non-religious country and the encroachment of the courts on the president's commander-in-chief powers, which is enormously dangerous," Gingrich said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Gingrich has said that, as president, he would ignore Supreme Court decisions that conflicted with his powers as commander in chief. [again, my emphasis] He said on "Face the Nation" he would subpoena a judge if the jurist disagreed with him, and send police "if you had to or you'd instruct the Justice Department to send a U.S. Marshall" if necessary to bring the judge in.

If you're wondering if this is actually as batshit crazy as it sounds, well, here's The Telegraph (UK):

Two former attorneys general from President George W. Bush’s administration blasted the views Mr Gingrich espoused in a 28-page document entitled “Bringing the Courts Back Under the Constitution".

Michael Mukasey told Fox News that Mr Gingrich’s proposals were “dangerous, ridiculous, totally irresponsible, outrageous, off-the-wall, and would reduce the entire judicial system to a spectacle".

His predecessor Alberto Gonzales said: “I would tread very, very carefully down the road with this notion that ’okay, this judge has rendered a decision that we think is very unpopular and we’re not happy with it so we’re going to try to impeach this judge."

Note that these aren't Democrats. These are right-wing Republicans from the most ideologically conservative administration America has ever seen, and even they think that Newt has lost his marbles.

But as both articles note, this kind of talk is very, very popular with the Republican base.

The Atheist Experience: the mafia boss analogy

This is from episode #672, in August of 2010, with Matt Dillahunty and Jeff Dee.

Hitchslaps from Family Guy

I'm not a big fan of Family Guy, but it can be pretty funny sometimes. And you rarely hear these kinds of things on network TV.

OK, most of them are kind of dumb. Well, I did say that I wasn't a big fan...

Richard Dawkins on The Colbert Report

Stephen Colbert is off this week, but here's an old clip where he interviewed Richard Dawkins.

This was probably from 2006 or 2007, I'm not sure. The clip was just posted on YouTube, but it's clearly from Dawkins' book tour.

Anyway, Colbert was his typical self: "Your book started off great. It has a shiny silver cover and I can see my face in it." Heh, heh.

The rest of it is pretty funny, too. Colbert is supposed to be a Catholic, but I wonder if he's actually a poe?

Mount & Blade: Warband on sale

(screenshots from GamersGate)

This seems to be a great time of year to buy computer games. If you haven't spent all your money on tinsel - or on GOG.com's great holiday sale - take a look at this offer from GamersGate: Mount & Blade: Warband at 66% off, or only about ten dollars.

I bought the original Mount & Blade in 2008, and it's great fun. It's basically an open-ended medieval combat sim, but what it does, it does extremely well. The mounted combat is especially fun. No other game has even come close to getting mounted combat right. (I don't mean realistic, because what do I know about mounted combat? No, I mean fun!)

I was terrible at it - I still am - but that made no difference at all. It's still a hoot to play. True, after awhile, I get tired of constant combat (admittedly, I get tired of all games after awhile). So I'll put the game aside for awhile. But I always come back to it. No other game really comes close to this kind of gameplay.

The developer, TaleWorlds, was originally just a husband and wife team from Turkey, I believe. They released the sequel, Mount & Blade: Warband, in 2010. I didn't buy it, not then, because it didn't seem to be very different from the original. Better graphics, yes. And an online multiplayer option,... but I don't play multiplayer games. But now, for only $10, this is going to be a no-brainer.

Note that there are some changes which improve the single-player game, besides just the better graphics (which aren't good enough for graphics whores, in any case). Now, you can start your own faction, even becoming a king yourself. You can woo and marry a noble lady. (I'm not sure about the options for female characters.) And there are apparently more options for improving your own lands.

I've heard that the game is somewhat harder than the original, and that's certainly nothing I need. I always played on the easiest game settings, and that was still none too easy for me! And note that the game doesn't hold your hand. In the original, at least, your character is dumped down in the wilderness with a broken-down horse and a few rusty weapons, and you're free to do whatever you want from there.

To some of us, that's glorious freedom. For others, it's just confusing, since you're not told what to do. Well, it takes all kinds.

Nevertheless, even if this isn't your kind of game, I think you'll find your $10 well spent. Even just as an idle break from what you normally play, it's likely to be a really nice change of pace. And you don't have to play long. You can just jump back in for a battle or two, occasionally.

...Because, make no mistake, this is a combat game. There are some welcome RPG features, but it's not a full-fledged fantasy world (certainly not without loading a mod). This game is about lancing enemies from horseback. It's about shooting people in the face with arrows. It's about wielding a sword and shield in desperate battle - and commanding your troops at the same time.

But what it does, it does very well, and it's lots of fun. At least, the original game was, and this one isn't supposed to be much different. (Note that I'm not, normally, a fan of this kind of game, either.) For $10, it's worth an upgrade. And if you don't have the original, $10 will get you a really fun game, even if you're as bad at this kind of thing as I am.

PS. Note that the With Fire and Blade expansion to Mount & Blade: Warband is also on sale at GamersGate at 66% off, or for about $5. This isn't a standalone product. It requires Warband to play it. The expansion changes the setting to Eastern Europe during the 17th Century and adds primitive firearms.

Apparently, this started as a mod to the original game, and it changes the gameplay quite a bit. So it's not as popular among many gamers. That's probably inevitable, and for $5, it's probably worth trying. Yeah, lots of "probablies" there, huh? The fact is, I just don't know.

Bigfoot

(Non Sequitur)

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

I've seen a few of these tributes since Christopher Hitchens died Thursday, but this is easily the best.

The 45 worst Fox News moments of 2011

From BuzzFeed, it's the 45 worst Fox News moments of 2011.

I suspect that it was originally supposed to be the ten worst Fox News moments of 2011, but there were just so many that it was hard to narrow it down any further.

Certainly I had a hard time picking just one to include here. Finally, I settled on the above image. If you can't read it, the original Associated Press headline read "AP Poll: Economic worries pose new snags for Obama."

Fox News changed that to "AP: Obama Has a Big Problem with White Women." Heh, heh. Yeah, that's not going to imply anything to the elderly white racists who watch Fox, is it?

Some of these "moments" are just funny, like Fox News showing a picture of Tina Fey doing her impression of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live,... mistaking that for the real Sarah Palin! And Palin works for Fox News, too!

And some are just disgusting, like labeling Elie Wiesel as "Holocaust winner," or Fox News readers' racist and misogynistic comments about Michelle Obama's appearance, or... well, most of these are disgusting, actually.

But they're all here, from Fox's campaign against the scientific consensus on global warming to their campaign against the "radical homosexual agenda" to their assertion that Americans can't really be "poor" if they have a refrigerator in their house.

And it's only December 17th. Maybe there are only 45 in this list because they wanted to leave room for five more that will likely appear before the end of year. Then, it's on to 2012 - an election year, so this list will probably need to be the 100 worst Fox News moments this time next year.

Christopher Hitchens is dead

(Gasper Tringale)

Just two days ago, I blogged about Christopher Hitchens' fight with cancer, posting some of Hitchens' own words about his desperate struggle. Well, yesterday, he lost the battle.

It's a fight we all lose, sooner or later, but that doesn't make this any easier to take, especially since Hitchens was only 62. (At my age, that no longer seems old.)

There are memorials everywhere on the internet, and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason is collecting obituaries here. But the best memorial might be that Tribute to Christopher Hitchens YouTube video back in November, since he was still alive then to see it.

If you haven't seen it, check it out. Hitchens touched a lot of people. Me, too. I didn't agree with him about everything (though I certainly wouldn't have wanted to debate him!), but I don't agree with anyone about everything. And he was always worth hearing.

There will be tributes for some time yet, I'm sure, but here are just a few of the comments I've seen on the web:

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today [Thursday, Dec. 15, 2011] at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but...  At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly. - Juli Weiner, Vanity Fair

We knew this was coming, but it doesn’t lessen the sting. ...

There are no words, for the man owned them all. And he produced them right up to the end. - Jerry A. Coyne

We knew him well; that is, he was one of those people who opened himself up so thoroughly, who expressed himself so excellently, who had a personality so strong, that millions of us can hold him in our mind’s eye. I can see him now — there’s a glass in his hand, his eyes are calm and steady, and he’s speaking in measured tones and with flawless English sentences with passion and reason perfectly intertwined. Even if I didn’t agree with him, I’d be standing awed and respectful before his clarity and elegance.

But I do not say farewell to Hitch. I do not say “rest in peace”. I definitely do not say that he has gone to a better place. I actually find myself already bracing myself for the next sign of deep disrespect that is destined to appear soon: the hackneyed political cartoon that draws him standing at the pearly gates.

Hitch is dead. We are a diminished people for the loss. - PZ Myers

A fair amount of what Christopher Hitchens said and wrote irritated the fuck out of me. Some of it even seriously angered me. But the man was brilliant. He did difficult, at times even dangerous work that few others were willing to do. He was fearless about saying what nobody else was willing to say. He debated with an army of facts ready at his tongue and a wit like a stiletto dipped in venom. He was often totally fucking hilarious. He was beyond eloquent.

And he faced his illness, and what he clearly knew was his impending death, with a courage and grace and brutal honesty that was nothing short of astonishing. ...

A fair amount of what he wrote irritated and angered me. And that’s one of the things I like best about the atheist movement. We don’t have to idolize our leaders and our heroes. We can disagree with them. We can recognize that they’re human. We can say to them one day, “Damn, that was brilliant”… and the next day say, “You’re being a fucking asshole, this is beneath you”… and the next day say yet again, “Okay, that was brilliant.” - Greta Christina

David Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic Monthly, to which Christopher contributed many sparkling essays, once took him out to lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. It was—I think—February and the smoking ban had gone into effect. Christopher suggested that they eat outside, on the terrace. David Bradley is a game soul, but even he expressed trepidation about dining al fresco in forty-degree weather. Christopher merrily countered, “Why not? It will be bracing.”

Lunch—dinner, drinks, any occasion—with Christopher always was. One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit. - Christopher Buckley

We have lost an irreplaceable person in this age of American unreason. By “we,” I do not mean only atheists (although Hitchens is irreplaceable in that respect too) but everyone who values rationality and the English language. Hitchens, whose obituaries are devoting equal space to his atheism and his support for the Iraq war (he once called me stupid to my face for disagreeing with him about the latter), was a great, scathing Anglo-American writer in the tradition of Thomas Paine, George Orwell and Jessica Mitford. We may not see his like again, because the respect for language exemplified by his writings is fading away. ...

No American atheist was ever going to give a book a title like The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice . No, we would begin such a book, if we ever thought about writing it in the first place, by making sure to acknowledge all the good that missionaries, somewhere, somehow, must have done. Christopher, by contrast, went straight for the jugular, noting: “As Edward Gibbon observed about the modes of worship prevalent in the Roman world, they were `considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful.’ Mother Teresa descends from each element in this ghastly triptych.” What a wonderful image “ghastly triptych” is! - Susan Jacoby

The last few days had been, for those of us who knew he hadn't much time left, a strange bundle of suffering commingled with the joy of recollection. We got to relive what endeared him to us from the start: the hilarious tabletalk, the Borgesian library of political and literary arcana that he kept inside his head, and the writing. Of course the writing, particularly the put-downs that never let their subjects get back up again: “No one has a higher opinion of Alexander Haig than I do, and I think he is a homicidal buffoon,” “a herd of antis in search of a climax,” “not only a bore, but the cause of boredom in others.” ...

On email, Hitch was always quickest to reply when I was in need of some kind of help which was more often than I’d have liked – a letter of recommendation for a job, or an introduction to someone I wanted to meet or interview. Friendship was his only real ideology. - Michael Weiss

Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone. And as a result many readers felt they knew him. Walking with him down the street in New York or through an airplane terminal was like escorting a movie star through the throngs. - Graydon Carter

But I guess all that is why I want to put down for the record that in addition to all those things, Hitchens was incredibly kind and giving with his time. Every time I met him over the past seven years he greeted me like an old friend, and as far as I could see, every fan he met got his full attention. Even when he was dying, he had time to sit down with a little girl to figure out what books should be on her reading list.

There are religious folks who are currently threatening violence because the hashtag #GodIsNotGreat was trending on Twitter. Their protests got Twitter to remove the topic from their top trends. Ironically, these people will try to convince the world to remember Hitchens as a hateful man. Like Mother Theresa, they’ll hide their own hatred and bigotry and destructive behaviors behind the veil of Godly love in order to convince the world that they’re the saintly victims.

Let’s not let them win. - Rebecca Watson

I'll still be posting occasional "Hitchslap" videos. There are plenty on YouTube. But Christopher Hitchens is dead. There won't be anything new. It's a real shame.

Well, death is a part of life. We couldn't have life without death. We certainly couldn't have progress without death. For all that we lose when someone dies - and we do lose - younger people move up to take their place.

It's hard to imagine anyone actually replacing Christopher Hitchens. That's not what I mean. But it's taking nothing away from grief and regret, it's taking nothing away from our memories, to acknowledge that life goes on.

And when our time comes, as it will come, we could do worse than face it like Hitchens did.

The Atheist Experience

Matt Dillahunty: "How do I tell the difference between your claim and a delusion?"

The caller has no answer, but just babbles unrelated gibberish until he's cut off.

Matt: "I realize that this is his brain spinning in circles - desperately - because he has no answers to these difficult questions, and he's trying to cling to whatever it is that he believes."

The Atheist Experience is a public access TV show from Austin, Texas. It's streamed live on the web, and the shows are also available after-the-fact on YouTube. It's very entertaining - and usually quite educational - but the full shows are an hour long (some, an hour and a half).

They're well worth watching, but a bit too long to embed here. But there are all sorts of excerpts posted by all sorts of people on YouTube, and those are appropriate here. So I thought I'd start posting a few of them, with a new "Atheist Experience" tag for an easy way to find them all.

This clip is typical of many of their theist callers. You wonder sometimes if these people have ever really thought about what they believe. Have they ever stopped to think about why they believe what they believe?

In America, Christians can get by with that, because they may never encounter anyone who thinks differently. Certainly, that was the case when I grew up. But the experience of atheists is quite different. Most of us grew up in Christian homes, and even those who didn't have still been surrounded by Christians all their lives. We have thought about what we believe. We've really had little choice about that.

Here's another thing. When asked for evidence, Andrew replies, "Logical evidence or physical evidence?"

But as Jeff Dee points out, "There is no 'logical evidence.' Evidence is a thing you feed into logic to find out what's true."

The thing is, it doesn't matter if something seems logical to you. You need evidence. After all, does it really seem logical that we're living on the surface of a rapidly-spinning ball? Logic alone might well lead you to believe in a flat Earth. We need logic and evidence. Logic alone just doesn't do it.

Note that this is an excerpt from episode #738, which aired Dec. 4, 2011. The complete show is here.

Celebrating the Bill of Rights

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Today is the 220th anniversary of the ratification, on December 15, 1791, of the U.S. Bill of Rights. Above, that's just the first of these ten amendments. But think of how different things might have been today without that.

Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom to protest injustice - can you imagine an America without those freedoms? Think of how important the Bill of Rights really is!

And then, coincidentally, there's this:

Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.

Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of "a war that appears to have no end". ...

"It's something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent." ...

Critics accused the president of caving in again to pressure from some Republicans on a counter-terrorism issue for fear of being painted in next year's election campaign as weak and of failing to defend America.

Human Rights Watch said that by signing the bill Obama would go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.

"The paradigm of the war on terror has advanced so far in people's minds that this has to appear more normal than it actually is," Malinowski said. "It wasn't asked for by any of the agencies on the frontlines in the fight against terrorism in the United States. It breaks with over 200 years of tradition in America against using the military in domestic affairs."

In fact, the heads of several security agencies, including the FBI, CIA, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general objected to the legislation. The Pentagon also said it was against the bill.

The FBI director, Robert Mueller, said he feared the law could compromise the bureau's ability to investigate terrorism because it would be more complicated to win co-operation from suspects held by the military.

"The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain co-operation from the persons in the past that we've been fairly successful in gaining," he told Congress.

Civil liberties groups say the FBI and federal courts have dealt with more than 400 alleged terrorism cases, including the successful prosecutions of Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber", Umar Farouk, the "underwear bomber", and Faisal Shahzad, the "Times Square bomber".

Where do I even begin with the crazy on this one? Shall I note the political cowardice of Democrats who are always frightened of what Republicans will say about them? Republicans will always find something bad to say about them, even if they have to make it up!

Shall I point out, as I regularly do, how cowardly we Americans have become, willing to give up hard-fought civil liberties for the promise - which no politician can actually give - of protection from a rag-tag band of religious nuts using improvised explosives? Jeebus, when I grew up, we worried about global thermonuclear war, and we still managed to hang onto some of our freedoms!

Shall I predict the inevitable idiocy on the left, where some loons will certainly use this to proclaim that there's "no difference" between the Democrats and the Republicans, how it doesn't matter which candidate we elect for president, because they're "all alike"? Yes, I'm very disappointed in Obama on this issue, but there's a huge difference between him and the Republicans. Let's not lose our sanity just because the right-wing has already lost theirs.

Finally, do I really have to point out how insane it is to fight extremism with extremism? How do you think we'll fare in this "war on terror" if we don't have an alternative to offer? If we give up our respect for the law and our respect for civil liberties, what are we going to offer other people that's any different from what the terrorists are offering them? Oh, you can be a Christian crazy, rather than a Muslim one? Nice choice there!

Well, I'm tired. I'm real tired of arguing against insanity like this. It's been at least ten years now, since the start of the Bush administration, and we haven't recognized these fundamental mistakes even now that Bush is gone? I've only been blogging for two years, but I'm tired of arguing these things here, too. I'm not giving up, never think that. But I'm tired.

So, on this 220th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, maybe I'll just point out three more of those amendments which we should be celebrating, instead of gutting. Here's the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

And here's the Fifth Amendment (these all kind of hang together):

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Note that part about "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"?  And there's an exception to a Grand Jury indictment, but only for people who are actively serving in the military during wartime. Yeah, soldiers give up some of their rights - temporarily - when we're actually at war. That's just one of the many sacrifices they make in order to serve our country.

Think there's still some wiggle room here? I don't, but OK, here's the Sixth Amendment:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

So far, I've quoted fewer than half of the amendments in the U.S. Bill of Rights, and I don't see any way that law could be constitutional. (Frankly, I don't see  how it could even be constitutional for non-citizens, since there's no indication that these rights apply only to citizens.) More importantly - since I'm not a constitutional scholar - I don't see any reason why we'd want to give up these civil rights.

I don't care how much of a coward you are, how can you support abandoning our fundamental civil liberties like this? Today, we should be honoring the Bill of Rights, not trying to subvert it. Of course, that's no different than what we should be doing every day.

Marvin E. Quasniki at the Iowa Republican debate

You've got to admit that this is the least crazy candidate they've come up with yet. Go, Quasniki!

Stephen Colbert's big gay roundup

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Stephen Colbert's Big Gay Roundup - Military Bestiality & Homosexual Penguins
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So, first of all, who gave World Nut Daily a seat in the White House press corps? I hope National Lampoon has a place then, too. "Does the Commander-in-Chief approve or disapprove of bestiality in our armed forces?" Heh, heh. Yeah, inquiring minds want to know.

At least White House Press Secretary Jay Carney  didn't dignify that with an answer. And you could see the journalists in the room (I'm not going to say "other journalists") smiling in amusement at the crazy. But is this what our nation has become? What is World Nut Daily doing there?

And the whole idea of "gay penguins" is kind of ridiculous. You can't look at another species, especially one so distantly related to our own, and anthropomorphize them like this. Yeah, this really is a subject that deserves satire, and that's the case whether you're "pro" or "anti" hot gay penguin sex.