Hilary warned us. We wouldn't listen.

And now we pay the price for our arrogant blindness: The Invasion Has Begun.

The squid hunt in schools of up to 1,200, can swim up to 15 mph and can skim over the water to escape predators.

"I wouldn't go into the water with them for the same reason I wouldn't walk into a pride of lions on the Serengeti," said Mike Bear, a local diver. "For all I know, I'm missing the experience of a lifetime."

The squid are too deep to bother swimmers and surfers, but many longtime divers say they are staying out of the surf until the sea creatures clear out. Yet other divers, including Shanda Magill, couldn't resist the chance to see the squid up close.

On a recent night, Magill watched in awe as a dozen squid with doleful, expressive eyes circled her group, tapping and patting the divers and gently bumping them before dashing away.

One especially large squid suspended itself motionless in the water about three feet away and peered at her closely, its eyes rolling, before it vanished into the black. A shimmering incandescence rippled along its body, almost as if it were communicating through its skin.

But the next night, things were different: A large squid surprised Magill by hitting her from behind and grabbing at her with its arms, pulling her sideways in the water. The powerful creature ripped her buoyancy hose away from her chest and knocked away her light.

When Magill recovered, she didn't know which direction was up and at first couldn't find the hose to help her stay afloat as she surfaced. The squid was gone.

"I just kicked like crazy. The first thing you think of is, 'Oh my gosh, I don't know if I'm going to survive this. If that squid wanted to hurt me, it would have," she said.

Other divers have reported squid pulling at their masks and gear and roughing them up.

Because he's the pro-science President, don't you know?

Missed in all the conflagration over Obama funding destruction of embryonic human life (Think of it as a stimulus package for biotech corporations!™) is this malevolent tidbit:

He also ended funding for pluripotent stem cell research not involving human embryos. You know, the stuff that's making embryo-shredding obsolete.

Yeah, you're all about the science. Well, OK, crap science unshackled by ethics, but you can't make a failed revolution without scrambling a few kulaks.

Over to you, Vox Nova's pro-Obama contingent!

[Predicted Tourette-ish response: "It's Bush's fault!" Oh, and "Calvinism!"]

May God have mercy on her soul.

AIDS truther Christine Maggiore is dead at 52.

Proceeded by rivers of blood. An emblem of the decay of the Western mind.

Following the "If You Can't Say Something Nice..." adage, here are my thoughts about her:












.

Remember all the leftists saying how awful it was for Godbotherers to try to end P.Z. Myers' livelihood?

Yeah, that was awesome:

"I think Mike Koelzer is a contemptible, sanctimonious ass, and I hope he goes out of business," said Myers on his blog on Monday. "[Please, if you live in Grand Rapids, boycott Kay Pharmacy.] If Mike Koelzer comes to your town to speak in some demented fundagelical [sic] church, feel free to picket and protest, and feel free to attend and grill him with difficult questions."

Before we dismiss Prof. Aneurysm's statements out of hand, we must give due weight to the fact that he's easily one of the top ten contemptible and sanctimonious asses in North America. So, if you subscribe to the "takes one to know one" theory...

Naturally, Dr. Cranky's herd mind of free-thinkers sprang into action, covering themselves with glory and advancing the banner of Pure Reason into the benighted heartlands of religious ignorance:

Koelzer confirmed that he had received over 400 emails in the 36 hours since Myers' post, but he remarked that the 'difficult questions' Myers wanted his readers to grill him with were nowhere to be found.
"I had to read all of the messages," Koelzer told LifeNews.com. "They were quite boring. None of them offered up any real argument, and they were all demanding I give them their choice while denying my own choice."

"It was like they were following the same script, as if it was their own church or club, using the same boring rhetoric, and the same 5 or 6 words or phrases were repeated often such as 'sanctimonious,' 'fairy in the sky,' 'bronze age,' and 'crackers,'" added Koelzer.

"I was handed a script of what their arguments were," observed Koelzer. "Attacks with no reasoning or posing of an argument, demanding I do everything and anything they want."

The messages also displayed a lack of understanding and outright attempts at deception.
Several messages assumed that Koelzer charged for his speaking engagements and accused him of trying to generate speaking revenue, and others attacked him by lumping his position with unrelated fundamentalist Christian ideals such as creationism.

Many of the messages were sent by people posting as customers, claiming they had been to the store and received 'lectures,' or gave names that were not among the customers of Kay Pharmacy.

"My customers who didn't like the policy left 6 years ago," said Koelzer.

Some messages, however, threatened violence to the store or Koelzer himself, such as, "Burn[ing] the building to the ground."

Voltaire would be so proud. Oddly enough, there is no word yet from Dr. Science about his minions' threats of violence, nor how it might reflect badly on
"rationalism."

Drop the good doctor a note of support here.

[H/t to Larry for the find.]

Is this something?

Deal Hudson at Inside Catholic reports that McCain has shifted on a part of embryonic stem cell research. The right folks are squawking about it, but any insight that can be offered would be greatly appreciated.

Little man, smaller mind.

By now most of you have probably heard about Paul Z. Myers, a biology professor at a second-tier Minnesota public university who is soliciting his equally stunted fanboys to provide him with a Host from a Catholic Mass whereupon he can visit some destructive, sacrilegious behavior. Here's a link to the idiocy in question that won't drive up his link score. First, let me state that if he has been the subject of credible death threats, I hope those who made them are punished to the fullest extent of the law. And if any of them are Catholics, I hope they are subject to excommunication. Just because he's an ass doesn't mean that it's open season. Ever.

Moving on.

Please note that Myers is not a model of godless consistency, being a critic (!) of the Muhammad cartoons published a couple years back. For all of the proper leftist-cant reasons, natch.

Let me just add at this point that taunts to do the same to a copy of the Koran are contemptible, really. Why bay for the same mistreatment of others? "Hit him, too!"

Oh, I know--he's motivated by pure pragmatism, given Minnesota's burgeoning traditionalist Muslim population. And he made a threat to desecrate a Koran that he didn't follow through on last year. Good. I don't want to give this clown the license to do something equally asinine to someone else. Myers has done his level best to poison public discourse and toss a grenade into the public square--let's not coarsen it any further.

To get to the point, Myers is not a particularly impressive man. And I fully predict he'll back down. In fact, he's already started a climbdown as his last statement in the interview shows.

Prediction? It was a joke/satire/thought experiment (the rationales will be confused) to demonstrate how violent Christians are when push comes to shove. The reaction proves it, you see, and this explanation will leave him confirmed in his moral superiority over the godbotherers. His dim fans will stomp their approval and the administration/trustees of the University of Minnesota--Morris can go back to lives of contented anonymity.

On the positive side, we've learned a lot about the Myers brand of atheism, to the disgust of other nonbelievers. It is a thoughtless and unreflective ideology that can't be bothered to engage the other side on its own terms, preferring the irrational, emotional and insulting. A great advertisement for the brights, PZ!

Finally, his own behavior contradicts his claim that "Religion is actually fading a little bit." If that were the case, he would just wish it ill and let it continue to fade. Stunts like this argue that he thinks the opposite.

Why so loud, Prof. Myers? As was said of the equally shrill Richard Dawkins:

Scientists all over the nation must hold their heads and groan whenever Richard Dawkins appears on television, as he did in The Root of All Evil? (Monday, C4). He is such a terrible advertisement, such an awful embarrassment, the Billy Graham of the senior common room. His splenetic, small-minded, viciously vindictive falsetto rant at all belief that isn’t completely rooted in the natural sciences is laughable. Dawkins is a born-again Darwinist, an atheist, so why is he devoting so much blood pressure and time to arguing with something he knows doesn’t exist? If it’s not there, Richard, why do you keep shouting at it? He looks like a scientific bag lady screaming at the traffic, and watching him argue with a fundamentalist Christian, you realise they were cut from identical cloth, separated at birth.

Just so.

Gobineau's grandson.

James Watson is in hot water again for his racial theorizing.

Yes, again.

Here's a fun experiment for those inclined to use evolution as a truncheon against religion in general and Christianity in particular: refute Watson using only evolutionary theories. No sanctimonious moralizing, please. Regardless of whether or not such invocations are derived from blathering about Middle Eastern sky deities or other pre-Enlightenment notions of "morality." Keep your philosophy off the good professor's body, please.

[H/t to Mark.]

[Update: Let me be clear: I believe that Dr. Watson can be refuted by Sola Scientia. But that's a sterile, inhuman response, isn't it?]

If I seem a little curt in the comment box below...

Consider this the apology for the tone. Sort of.

Frankly, waving the "Patient Suffering From X" is a 21st Century equivalent of waving the bloody shirt. It is usually done, as was the case below, with a "You'd cut off his pain meds, too" tone that poisons the well quite nicely, thanks. Hey, I can do it too: I know a patient suffering from an advanced case of Parkinson's who lives in Italy. He drools on himself, shakes uncontrollably, and slurs his speech. Here's the catch: He's passionately--passionately--opposed to embryonic stem cell research.

Does that even the playing field? Are we equal now--each of us with passionate suffering advocates on opposite sides of the equation? If that's what it takes, so be it.

Moving on--consider this fact: embryonic stem cell research supporters present the case for their caused as the panacea for all human infirmities. Consider Ron Reagan, Jr.'s speech at the Democratic National Convention:

And another thing, these embryonic stem cells, they could continue to replicate indefinitely and, theoretically, can be induced to recreate virtually any tissue in your body. How’d you like to have your own personal biological repair kit standing by at the hospital? Sound like magic? Welcome to the future of medicine.

Leaving aside the oddity of a former ballet dancer with no medical background purporting to accurately describe the advantages of advanced medical research in its initial stages (somewhat like the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles purporting to describe the technical advantages of the latest generation of snowblowers), not only do all of us know a Patient X--each of us is Patient X. Have a family history of dementia, heart disease, various cancers--like mine? You can now weigh in on ESCR with full credibility--even if you obviously happen to be a heartless theocrat one step removed from burning Galileo at the stake.

Like me.

If I might, I'd like to offer an alternative approach--let the kids live, and harvest the cord blood instead, which is a truly rich source of stem cells. With upwards of 200,000 embryos in "storage," just think of the possibilities--and the families desperate for children who can now have them--two problems solved at once.

A final aside, a chilling thought for the morning: what if ESCR does achieve breakthroughs? You might want to hope that Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses continue to win court cases regarding forced medical treatment. Think about it. Though I have real doubts as to how long a conscience exemption would last against the demands of "public health."

Culture of Death Watch

Or Death of Culture Watch. Works either way.

Speaking of eugenics, a story about our hidden past. One that many of our educated barbarians would be perfectly comfortable returning to, apparently. "Say what you will about Hitler...." [Link from Mark Sullivan]
The forced sterilization policy was (surprise, surprise) upheld by our Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), which includes the infamous quote by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Wesley Smith at NRO reports on the decay of medical ethics, with a developing trend in medical experimentation on living patients. "Say what you will about Josef Mengele...."

Finally, Rod Dreher reports on Hollywood's latest love-in with nihilism, The Hours. "Say what you will about abandoning your family...."