The trials and tribulations of Pope Francis

I have it on good authority that the new pope, Francis I, is either a spy in league with extraterrestrials, or else is an emissary of the Antichrist who will oversee the destruction of Rome.  Or possibly both at the same time.  It's hard to tell, frankly, because my source for this, an article called "Pope Francis: His Jesuitical, Extraterrestrial, 'False Prophet,' and Political Identities," doesn't seem all that certain itself.

And I have to admit that "good authority" may be a bit of an exaggeration, here.  This article was authored by none other than Alfred Lambremont Webre, who has previously claimed that President Obama has visited Mars, that the Earth would be bombarded by "fourth dimensional energy" on November 11, 2011 resulting in all of us being able to engage in "fourth dimensional sex," and that there is a brown dwarf star on the way that will reach its closest approach this year in July and which will trigger "massive electrical discharges" that will result in a catastrophic flood.  (None of us can see the approach of the star except for Alfred, apparently, because the government is hiding its approach from us with chemtrails.  He himself saw it using a "chronovisor," which is a machine that allows him to see the future.)

So, as you can see, he's not exactly the most credible witness right from the get-go.  Be that as it may, let's give him a chance, and hear what he has to say in his rambling diatribe.  Um, article.

Well, first, we have the obvious relevance of the date Pope Francis was elected:

March 13, 2013, the date of Pope Francis I nomination, was the 16th anniversary of the Phoenix Light, a massive space craft that overflew Phoenix, AZ. on March 13, 1997. March 13, 1997 is a significant event in the Exopolitical community that follows the Extraterrestrial presence on Earth.

Don't expect me to believe that's a coincidence.  Alfred either.  You just know that the College of Cardinals was sitting there, on the first day of the conclave, and one of them said, "Hang on... let's wait till tomorrow to decide.  Because then we'll be voting him in on the sixteenth anniversary of a random UFO sighting.  That will send a message, won't it?"  And all of the other cardinals said, "Amen, Your Holy Eminence, that sounds like a dandy idea."

Then, we have a bit about the "Prophecies of St. Malachy," about which I've previously written.  The last pope in the prophecies was one "Petrus Romanus" (Peter the Roman), who was supposed to be the Antichrist's right-hand man, and was going to be in charge of the church during the Tribulation.  So, there's lots of speculation as to whether Pope Francis is actually Petrus Romanus, even though he's not really Peter from Rome, he's Jorge from Argentina.  But hey, close enough, right?  After all, Alfred doesn't even touch on a much greater likelihood, which is that Pope Francis is actually George Bluth from Arrested Development:

Then we have a long, confusing bit about how Pope Francis, in his previous life as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, was a Jesuit.  First of all, the Jesuits are somehow connected with research into extraterrestrials, so that's significant.  Don't ask me how.  Secondly, we all know how the Jesuits are an evil secret organization bent on world domination.  Alfred then tells us all about the "Jesuit Oath," which includes the following lovely passage:

[I] declare and swear that His Holiness, the Pope, is Christ's Vice-Regent and is the true and only head of the Catholic or Universal Church throughout the earth; and that by the virtue of the keys of binding and loosing given to His Holiness by my Saviour, Jesus Christ, he hath power to depose heretical Kings, Princes, States, Commonwealths, and Governments, and they may be safely destroyed. Therefore to the utmost of my power I will defend this doctrine and His Holiness's right and custom against all usurpers of the heretical or Protestant authority whatever, especially the Lutheran Church of Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and the now pretended authority and Churches of England and Scotland, and the branches of same now established in Ireland and on the continent of America and elsewhere and all adherents in regard that they may be usurped and heretical, opposing the sacred Mother Church of Rome. I do now denounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince or State, named Protestant or Liberal, or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers. I do further declare the doctrine of the Churches of England and Scotland of the Calvinists, Huguenots, and others of the name of Protestants or Masons to be damnable, and they themselves to be damned who will not forsake the same.

The problem is, the "Jesuit Oath" is a hoax.  It was a bit of anti-Catholic vitriol passed around by Protestant fear-mongers in the early 20th century (the same era that produced the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion).  So, really, these two pieces of nasty nonsense constitute two of the first-ever-recorded conspiracy theories.  The evil Catholics are trying to destroy the world!  No, wait, it's the Jews!  No, wait, its both!

In any case, the whole thing is wrapped up with aliens, somehow.  In a passage that should be enshrined forever in the Annals of WTF, Alfred writes:

One hermeneutical interpretation would have "the dragon" of the Book of Revelations identified as "Extraterrestrial civilizations that the False Prophet (putatively Pope Francis I) promotes to humanity. This role of a Jesuit Pope, promoting "Official ET Disclosure" along with other major institutions such as the United Nations and the major space-faring and extraterrestrial knowledgeable nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China, would certainly fulfill one dystopian view of extraterrestrial "Disclosure", that of a false flag extraterrestrial invasion such as was predicted by Dr. Wernher von Btraun [sic] on his death bed and related to Disclosure Project witness Dr. Carol Rosin.

Oh.  Okay.  What?

So.  Anyway.  I know that regular readers of this blog know me well enough to realize that I'm very far from a Catholic apologist.  I think a lot of the Vatican's policies are repressive, backwards, and medieval, and there's no indication that Pope Francis is anything but a party liner in this regard.  And there are, apparently, some questions to be asked about the new pope's past, especially his alleged complicity with abuses by the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.  But other than that -- for cryin' in the sink, leave the poor guy alone.  He's barely had a chance to do anything yet, good or bad.  It seems a little premature to conclude that he's going to sell us out to the extraterrestrials.  Or the Antichrist.  Or the evil Jesuits.  Or whoever.  My guess is that he'll just continue the same policies of the last pope, pretty much, and things will go on in the church as they always have.

So, anyway, I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt for the time being.  And given that I'm an atheist, I think that's pretty generous, don't you?

Sneak thievery

Having dealt with such issues in recent posts as the ethics of resurrecting extinct animal species, and the difficulty of addressing the problems with the American educational system, I want to look today at an even more serious problem: penis theft.

At this point, you are probably thinking, "Did I just read what I think I just read?"  I know that's what I thought when I came across the article on AlterNet entitled "Penis Snatching On the Rise -- Africa's Genital-Stealing Crime Wave Hits the Countryside."  So, yes: you did just read that.  And yes, it's what it sounds like.

Well, sort of.  My first guess would have been that for some reason, better left un-thought-about, there was a cult of some sort that was stealing the body parts off of corpses.  If that's all it had been, it would have merited little more than a quick retch before moving on.  But no, it's weirder than that.  These people believe that somehow, guys are being relieved of their favorite body part magically, while they're still alive.

For example, the author of the article, Louisa Lombard, tells of a Sudanese traveler going through the Central African Republic town of Tiringoulou.  The traveler stopped for a cup of tea, and after receiving it, shook hands with the tea seller.  The unfortunate tea seller felt "an electric tingling," and at that point realized that "his penis had shrunk to a size similar to that of a baby's."  There was an outcry from the alleged victim, which led to a small-scale riot, during which a second man fell prey to the same fate.

Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase "going off half-cocked," doesn't it?

Anyhow, it'd be nice to think that there would be at least one voice of rationality in the crowd who would demand that the two supposed targets drop trou and prove that they had been de-privated, but I guess no one thought of that.  Everyone just sort of said, "Oh, okay.  That makes sense."  And alas for the poor traveler, he was subjected to a "harsh interrogation" and was eventually shot to death for his magical crimes.  And as far as the leader of the armed rebel group who governs the town, and who oversaw the traveler's execution, he tells a different story; he said that the man wasn't killed, that he "mysteriously vanished from his holding cell."

And lest you think that this weird belief is confined to central Africa, allow me to point out that Singapore has had outbreaks of, um, dewangification as well.  Check out, if you dare, this article, entitled, "The Great Singapore Penis Panic and American Mass Hysteria," which is about an epidemic of "koro," a condition in which men suffer "a catastrophic loss of yang energy," causing their penises to shrivel away.

Well, needless to say, there's no such thing as any of this stuff.  So, for any of you guys in my readership who has read this post hunched over in a protective half-crouch, and with a horrified expression on your face, fear not.  There's only one thing I know of that can cause a similar effect:

And fortunately, it's temporary and reversible.

What I find astonishing about all of this is how credulous people are, and how seldom it ever occurs to anyone to say, "Prove it."  You claim that you're a psychic, and can accurately predict the future?  Prove it.  You claim that you can communicate with the spirits of the dead?  Prove it.  You claim that someone magically caused your willie to shrink?  Prove it.  The burden of proof lies with the person making the outrageous claim -- not, as in the case of the poor Sudanese traveler, with the one trying to defend himself from it.

But, apparently, such an approach is sadly uncommon in the world, and not only in such undeveloped, poverty-stricken areas as the Central African Republic, but in the urban First World streets of Singapore.  As always, there's just one solution to all of this, and that's education in science -- the only thing I know of that is successful at eradicating myth, irrationality, and superstition.  But given that here in the United States we still have a significant percentage of the population who believe in horoscopes, homeopathy, and young-earth creationism, maybe I shouldn't point fingers.  After all, none of those ideas is any more scientifically supported than the claim that someone can magically steal a guy's penis by shaking his hand.

Raising the dead

In the iconic movie (and book) Jurassic Park, scientists use genetic technology -- and samples of blood from the stomachs of mosquitoes preserved in amber -- to recreate various dinosaur species.  With, of course, terrible results, being that in science fiction, nothing good ever comes out of scientists trying to "play god."  Various people were messily devoured, and the ones that escaped (barely) were left to ponder if it was possible for scientific research to go too far.

We seem to be at the point of finding out.

Not, of course, that it will be dinosaur-era animals, at least not at first.  Way too little DNA is left intact in fossilized remains from 65-plus-million years ago to pull a Jurassic Park-style trick and resurrect, say, the Pteranodon (always one of my favorites).  But we will, in, short order, see the first reborn extinct species created in a lab.

The best candidate for the winner in this Race to Raise the Dead is likely to be the Gastric-brooding Frog, a bizarre amphibian species from Australia that gets its name from the females' behavior of carrying their tadpoles around in their stomachs.  The frog was declared extinct in the wild in 1979, and the last captive individual died in 1983.

The technique is simple to describe, and immensely difficult in practice; obtain DNA samples from preserved specimens, insert that DNA into the fertilized egg cell of a related species that has had its own DNA removed, and hopefully this zygote will begin to divide and develop -- into an individual of the species that donated the DNA.

Of course, a million things can go wrong.  The role of genetic switches in development is still a new area of research; it's known that your DNA when you were an embryo was different than your DNA is now, especially with regards to which segments were being actively transcribed and which were not.  In order to get this technique to work, the nucleotides in DNA not only have to be in the correct sequence, the genes encoded therein have to turn on and turn off in a tightly-orchestrated fashion in order to produce a normal individual.

The hurdles, however, haven't discouraged scientists in this field.  The research team working on the Gastric-brooding Frog, led by Mike Archer of the University of New South Wales, has actually gotten the genetically altered embryonic cells to divide, apparently in a completely normal fashion, which has encouraged other groups working toward the same goal.  In the United States, a group called "Revive and Restore" is trying to bring back the Passenger Pigeon, once the most abundant bird in North America, which was driven to extinction by overhunting in 1914.

And Ben Novak, of the Passenger Pigeon "de-extinction" project, believes that it is only a matter of time.  "This whole idea that extinction is forever is just nonsense," he said, in an interview in Forbes.  "Someone could make a major breakthrough in next two years."

Me, I'm of two minds about this.  As a biologist, I have to say that the whole idea is just tremendously cool.  The idea that I could one day see a formerly extinct animal, alive and well, is just thrilling.  I'd give a lot to see a Thylacine, a Carolina Parakeet, a Moa, a Kaua'i O'o, or a Giant Ground Sloth.  And what about more remote animals, ones from further back?  How would you like to be eye-to-eye with a Brontops?

Of course, the more distant in the past you reach, the more difficult the procedure becomes.  Not only has any DNA from prehistoric animals had longer to degrade, often to the point of there being no useful fragments left, there's the problem of finding a related species in whose eggs you could do the insertion process.  Whether Gastric-brooding Frogs and Passenger Pigeons will return soon is a matter of conjecture, but it is nearly certain that seeing a Brontops stomping around in your garden is a far more remote possibility, one which may never be realized.

Then, of course, there are the inevitable ethical issues surrounding resurrecting extinct species.  The time of the Passenger Pigeon, for example, is long past -- when there were thousands of square miles of trackless forest in the eastern half of North America.  This bird only survived well in huge flocks (tens of thousands of individuals), which "darkened the skies when they flew over," according to accounts of people who saw them.  One, two, or even a couple of dozen of birds would be nothing more than a curiosity -- it would not be the same as truly reintroducing the species, a goal that is probably impossible due to the changes in the ecosystem.

But still, it's a fascinating idea.  For me, the coolness factor outweighs my ethical qualms, which probably isn't a good thing to admit.  Be that as it may, it is absolutely stunning how far science has come since the last Passenger Pigeon closed her eyes in death in 1914.  The ways in which the world has changed are far deeper, and more meaningful, than the visible alterations in the landscape.  And it looks like very soon, one of the laws we thought was an absolute -- extinction is forever -- may be overturned.

Bargain basement miracles

You know, the quality of miracles has really gone down, of late.

Back in biblical days, god really knew how to conjure up a miracle, didn't he?  Consider the following:

• God makes Balaam's donkey talk (Numbers 22:21-31)
• Jesus feeds "a great multitude" with five loaves and two fish (Matthew 14:13-21)
• Joshua makes the Earth stop rotating so he can finish a very important battle (Joshua 10:13)
• Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead (John 11:1-44)
• Moses parts the Red Sea and drowns lots of Egyptians (Exodus 14:1-30)
• God smites the crap out of Sodom and Gomorrah, and turns Lot's wife into a pillar of salt for having second thoughts (Genesis 19:24-26)
• God makes the entire Syrian army go blind, and then cures them all a few minutes later (2Kings 6:18-20)

And so on.  That's just a few.  And I think I am not alone in saying that any one of these -- not all, mind you but one -- would be sufficient to convince me that I really should reconsider my stance as an atheist.

But these days?  Yesterday, on Glenn Beck's website The Blaze, Billy Hallowell posted a piece called "3 Real-Life 'Miracles' That Took Place on the Set of The Bible."  Most of you have probably heard about the Mark Burnett/Roma Downey production that dramatizes the stories of biblical times, which debuted on March 3 and which has received critical acclaim (most of the critics I read acclaimed, "Meh").  But now Hallowell -- and others -- have put forth a stunning statement: that there were some genuine miracles that occurred during filming, miracles that not only prove god's existence, but show that he is 100% in favor of Burnett & Downey's film.

So, what are these miracles?  Hallowell tells us all about them:

1)  When they were filming the scene where Jesus is talking to Nicodemus about the Holy Spirit, the "wind literally picked up on its own."
2)  Burnett and Downey had hired a "snake wrangler" to round up any poisonous snakes that might be in the set area and potentially threaten cast or crew.  Before they were going to film the crucifixion scene, the "snake wrangler" found 48 snakes.
3)  During the filming of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, an "irreplaceable" piece of Jesus' costume came loose and floated away.  It was later found and returned by a kid who lived nearby.

And I'm thinking: that's the best you can do?  The wind "picking up on its own?"  (Because apparently under normal circumstances, the wind only blows when it's encouraged to.)  Some snakes... in a freakin' desert?  A kid returning a prop when everybody in a hundred-mile radius knew there was a movie being filmed?

As miracles go, those aren't exactly Grade-A quality, you know what I mean?  They're more "KMart Blue-Light Special."

You have to wonder, with all of the increasing disdain for religion you see in Western society, why god is insisting on playing coy with us.  It's a bit like the UFO cadre who believe that crop circles are aliens trying to communicate with us, and prove to a doubting populace that extraterrestrials are real.  You'd think, being super-intelligent aliens and all, that deciding to land in Times Square would occur to them as, on the whole, a more convincing alternative.  Likewise, if god really is invested in proving to humanity that he exists, the wind blowing is just not doing it for me.

Okay, yeah, I know the biblical passage about god being the "still, small voice" (1Kings 19:11-13).  But you know, that just won't wash.  God was sure as hell not a "still, small voice" when he smote 50,070 people for looking at the Ark of the Covenant (1Samuel 6:19).  So, what's going on, here?

Now, mind you, I'm not saying that god smiting fifty-thousand-odd people day after tomorrow would be a good thing.  That's a whole city's worth of people, for pete's sake, and there are no cities that have no redeeming features, even if you include Newark.  But some of the less smiteful miracles would sure do a lot to convince us doubters.

In any case, Hallowell's article ends with the line, "What do you think — mere coincidences or evidence of God’s intervention? You decide."

Okay, thanks, I will.  And my decision is: coincidences.  And in the case of the wind, it was: the wind.  If those are what pass for miracles these days, all I can say is that heaven's Quality Control Department sure is slacking.

Digital fingerprints

I've always been fascinated with patterns.  Starting with a love for geometric patterns when I was a kid, I remember finding out about the Fibonacci sequence, and then its connection to the Golden Ratio, in 8th grade -- and feeling like I'd touched something magical, some fundamental superstructure of the universe.  Then I discovered tessellations, and thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.  Then on to M. C. Escher, Penrose tiles, fractals, the Mandelbrot set...

 

 

We're all pattern-finders, really.  That's how the human brain works.  It's just that some of us are a little more obsessed than others.

 

Patterns exist all over nature, however chaotic it may appear, and those patterns apply to our behavior, as well.  We may think we're spontaneous and unpredictable, but our actions leave traces -- and those traces form patterns.  And if you analyze enough of the traces, you can make some pretty shrewd guesses about who left them.  This is the basis of a lot of forensic pathology work, and is the fundamental idea behind some fascinating new research out of Cambridge.  [Source]

 

Researchers at the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre developed software that can be used to analyze digital traces left by users -- in this case, Facebook "likes."  58,000 Facebook users agreed to be part of the study, and gave the study group demographic profiles as well as access to their Facebook accounts.  After that, the software went to town, coming up with correlations between a variety of demographics and which pages users had "liked."

 

And here's where even the researchers got a surprise.

 

Just from the Facebook "likes," the software achieved:

• 88% accuracy at determining gender
• 95% accuracy at telling African Americans from other ethnic groups
• 85% accuracy at telling Republicans from Democrats
• 82% accuracy at determining religious affiliation
• between 65% and 72% accuracy at determining relationship status
• between 65% and 72% accuracy at determining whether the user engaged in substance abuse
• 60% accuracy in determining if the user's parents were divorced
• "high" (but unstated, in the sources I read) accuracy at detecting such traits as extroversion, emotional stability, and openness
• a correlation between liking "Curly Fries" and high IQ (no, I didn't make that up)

Pretty stunning, eh?

 

The researchers made a point of checking to see if there were any "red flag" sorts of "likes;" but it turned out that in fact, there weren't, for the most part.  The software was quite good at determining sexual preference -- and yet, according to the study, less than 5% of homosexual users had "liked" such pages as "Gay Marriage."  (And, it's to be hoped, a good many progressive heterosexuals had "liked" that page as well.)  It was the aggregate of all of the person's "likes" that counted, not one or two specific ones.  It was the overall pattern that allowed the software to be so eerily accurate.

 

Of course, this opens up new avenues for data mining -- for good reasons and bad ones.  Expect targeted advertisement software to get a lot more sophisticated soon.  There could be more dire results, too.  "Similar predictions could be made from all manner of digital data, with this kind of secondary ‘inference’ made with remarkable accuracy -- statistically predicting sensitive information people might not want revealed," said Michal Kosinski, director of the study team.  "Given the variety of digital traces people leave behind, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for individuals to control...  I am a great fan and active user of new amazing technologies, including Facebook.  I appreciate automated book recommendations, or Facebook selecting the most relevant stories for my newsfeed.  However, I can imagine situations in which the same data and technology is used to predict political views or sexual orientation, posing threats to freedom or even life."

 

So, naturally, I had to go check out some of the things I'd "liked" on Facebook.  And no, unfortunately, "Curly Fries" wasn't one of them.  Here are a few of mine:

 

Music:

• Beck
• J. S. Bach
• Fun
• Angélique Kidjo
• Fiona Apple (okay, I have pretty eclectic musical tastes)

Books:

• Foucault's Pendulum
• Richard Dawkins
• Terry Pratchett
• Lord of the Rings
• Watership Down

Movies:

• The Usual Suspects
• Vanilla Sky
• The Matrix
• Ruthless People
• O Brother, Where Art Thou?
• I "Heart" Huckabee's
• Dogma
• Memento
• Scotland, PA

Television:

• The X Files
• Arrested Development
• Seinfeld
• Northern Exposure

Activities:

• Scuba Diving
• Wine Tasting
• Travel
• Writing
• Music Performance

Other:

• Kolibri Birdwatching Tours
• This American Life
• George Rodrigue (an artist I really like)
• Cthulhu
• The Tattoo Page
• Americans Against Protestors at Military Funerals

So, okay.  I'm not seeing a pattern here.  I guess that's not surprising, really.  This software is taking metrics on the entire sample, and coming up with a best guess -- however good the human brain is at ascertaining patterns, that kind of subtlety really requires a computer.  So other than a few obvious ones (anyone who makes a point of "liking" Richard Dawkins is pretty certain to be an atheist), it's no wonder that I don't see anything particularly pattern-like in my group of "likes."

 

Also, of course, the problem may just be that I don't "like" "Curly Fries."

Adiós, Hugo

Well, Hugo Chávez is dead and buried.  This fact thrills the hell out of some people, who hated his bombastic style and anti-American rhetoric, and disappoints others, who saw Chávez in the David role against the Goliath of "American imperialism."

Whichever version you go for, I don't think that anyone can argue with the fact that he was an odd, odd man.  He would periodically go on long, rambling diatribes about... stuff.  Sometimes it was hard to tell what, exactly, he was talking about, such as the time he claimed that life on Mars was destroyed by "imperialist capitalism."  Then there was the time he mentioned "human beings who have human shape but are not" -- giving rise to speculations that he was talking about the Reptilians.  (Of course, many of these same people who speculate that Chávez had inside information about Reptilians also believe that Lady Gaga is a Reptilian, so perhaps it behooves us to take this with a grain of salt.)

Be that as it may, I think we can all agree that Chávez was quite a peculiar character.

So it should come as no surprise that we now have claims that (1) he was killed by the Illuminati, and (2) that aliens came to his funeral.

Yup.  Poor Chávez didn't die of ordinary liver cancer; he died of "weaponized cancer," and was killed by "by a special Satellite Weapon designed to deliver a wave of Radio Active [sic] Signal to the Body which delievers [sic] Tumors to the Body."  (Source)  Chávez was a hero, the author says, who was taken out because he "knew too much" and because he was standing up against the "New World Order."

What exactly Chávez "knew" is open to question.  He certainly seemed to have limited knowledge about Mars, for example.  As far as his standing up against the "New World Order," whatever the hell that actually is, it seems like mostly who he stood up to was George W. Bush (whom he referred to variously as a "birdie," a "donkey," and "the devil").  And, honestly, I can't fault him for that.  I'm not a particularly political person, but I have to admit to having questioned GWB's morals, ethics, and IQ on numerous occasions myself.

Other than that, Chávez seems to have been a bit of a rambling nutjob, but certainly not as bad as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Un in the Dangerous Wacko Department.  If the Illuminati are beaming tumors into world leaders, Chávez seems like an odd place to start.

But of course, we have additional corroboration of his importance in the Grand Scheme of Things from the fact that the aliens thought him worthy enough to attend his funeral.  Well, to be fair, they didn't actually walk in, enormous black eyes brimming over with tears, blowing their, um, nostril-holes on space hankies.  But they did send a spaceship to salute Chávez as he bid farewell to this planet:

What?  You don't find that convincing?  Just because we need a great big arrow even to see where the spaceship is in the photograph?  Just because it could be damn near anything, from a fleck of dust on the camera lens to a distant pigeon?  Just because if there really had been a spaceship, hovering over a heavily populated part of Caracas in broad daylight, someone would have seen it and gotten a better shot of it?

So, okay, maybe not.  But you have to admit that if anyone deserved having aliens pay their respects, it was Chávez.  Even if he wasn't right about life on Mars being wiped out by capitalism, and he wasn't done in by Death Rays From Space, he still was strange enough that his passing deserved some kind of spectacular gesture.  Especially given that at the time, Lady Gaga was in a Top Secret Meeting with the other scaly-skinned non-human Reptilians (I hear they include Hillary Clinton, John Boehner, and Keith Richards, the last-mentioned of which I can hardly argue with), and so she couldn't make it down to say goodbye.

So, anyway, farewell, Hugo.  I may not have liked your politics much, but I have to admit that you were always impressive in the inadvertent humor department.  And even if you died of a perfectly ordinary disease, and the aliens actually didn't show up for your funeral, you still were a colorful, memorable man, and in this strange and chaotic world, maybe that's the best you can hope for.

The shield of intolerance

It's time people stop getting a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for acting like assholes as long as they say, "I'm doing this because of my religion."

I say this because of two bills that have come up nearly simultaneously -- hardly a coincidence -- in Kentucky and Tennessee.  The Kentucky bill, House Bill 279, allows "sincerely held religious beliefs" to trump anti-discrimination laws.  In Tennessee, Senate Bill 514 allows graduate students in social work, counseling, or psychology to refuse to serve individuals as part of their practicum if to do so runs counter to their "deeply held religious beliefs."  And even though neither bill says so in so many words, no one is in the least doubt about which group these bills are targeting -- the same group that has been the target of religious-based discrimination for as long as I can remember.  (Add that to the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Tennessee, still on the books, that prohibits teachers and other school staff from discussing homosexuality in public schools -- and which, in one interpretation, would allow school staff to "out" LGBT students to their parents against their wills.)

At what point do rational individuals have to simply stand up and say "enough?"  No, you can no longer hide behind the shield of your religion in order to justify your intolerance, narrow-mindedness, hatred, ignorance, and bigotry.  No, you can not simply choose to ignore overwhelming evidence from scientific research that homosexuality is an innate characteristic, and that calling it a "lifestyle choice" is about as sensible as using that term to describe my blond hair and blue eyes.  No, you can no longer use your leverage as a Religious Person to ramrod your beliefs into law in a country where church and state are supposed to be separate.

Yes, I know all religious people aren't like that.  But too many of the ones who aren't are content to let the ones who are speak for the whole.  And it's not just Christianity; Religion as a whole, capital "R," has a hell of a lot to answer for.  If we're looking to point fingers, we can't forget Islam, whose apologists keep calling it "a religion of peace," but whose most ardent practitioners burn down the houses of people with different beliefs because they're "blasphemers."  Whose scholars sent a professor of Islamic Studies to a talk at University College - London -- and the professor refused to speak unless the audience was segregated by gender.  Whose government leaders have condoned the flogging of a 15-year-old girl with a hundred lashes because she had premarital sex -- when she was actually raped repeatedly by her stepfather.

I wonder how much more it will take.  What further atrocities will have to happen before a majority of the people in this world have had enough?  I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what the fanatic fringe of religion is capable of.  These are the folks who created a reign of terror in northern Mali, an atrocity that we are only now beginning to understand.  They are the ones who killed tens of thousands of "heretics" -- many of them after horrific torture -- during the European Middle Ages.  They are the ones who destroyed the heritage of whole cultures in the name of sanctity -- the Bamiyan Buddhas, the quipus of the Inca, the priceless scrolls and books in the Library of Alexandria.

They are the ones who flew fully-loaded jet airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

I wish that the kind, rational, sensible, and compassionate people on the Earth -- whom I fervently, desperately believe are the majority -- would stand up and say to these lunatics, "You had your shot at ruling the world.  The time when religion drove the rule of law is over -- and, by the way, it is no coincidence that it was called 'the Dark Ages.'"  I wish they would say, "You are free to worship whomever you please, and engage in whatever rituals you choose -- in your churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples.  But you cannot any longer take those institutions and try to remold nations in their image.  You cannot any longer use your religious ideology to justify making an entire segment of society walk in fear."

And if they can't say that, I wish that enough of them would simply say, "You don't speak for me."

But I am afraid that day is not today.  For now, the bigots are still in ascendancy.  39 states in the United States, for example, specifically prohibit same-sex marriage -- thirty in their constitutions, and nine by statute.  All of these laws are religiously motivated, even if it's cast otherwise -- as if the rights of heterosexual married couples are somehow threatened by granting gays and lesbians the right to marry.

As if the rights of Saudi Arabian men are threatened by allowing women to vote.  As if the rights of Muslims are threatened by allowing people of other beliefs -- or no beliefs at all -- to live in peace.  As if the rights of heterosexual teens are threatened by even hearing the word "gay" mentioned in school.

To sum up: how dare you act as if your way of life is ever threatened by offering the same rights you have enjoyed your entire damned life to someone else.