Reason to celebrate

I am pretty late on this, but once I saw it I couldn't resist...

Sometimes science gives you reason to celebrate: "Does semen have antidepressent properties?"

(apparently it does)

Every man's reaction on planet earth?

Tramp Stamps

Some lower back tattoos are nice, I guess, but this one makes me just feel sorry for her.


Notice the sentence, "There is no limit to it's [sic] faith." The possessive "its" of love is misspelled "it's"...(unless she has an ironic freckle)

Conservatives heart porn

A new interesting study done on the correlation between political conservatism and porn:

• Benjamin Edelman --Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?. Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 1 (winter 2009): 209-220.
• New Scientist summary
• Charles Blow NYT blog summary
  

Eight of the top ten per capita porn consuming states gave their votes to John McCain.

The reason this is funny (to me) is the fact that conservatives and their puritanical style of government are so ironic and hypocritical. When the Religious Right and Rush Limbaugh run your party, you know you have some issues. If the Democrats headlined a former gay porn star at their far-left conference, it wouldn't be nearly as funny as when Republicans do it at their CPAC conference, because of the RR influence.

When the RR has a conference, they choose only "non-porn offering hotels..." at first this sounds like a moral choice (to support businesses who are "more pure") but then you realize it's just so they can't control their urges to watch big manly bear porn. They also can't deal with the raw fact that gay sex is observed in the animal kingdom all the time, so they probably prefer hotels without the Discovery Channel too. Religion is like porn in many ways.

While many religious people will say that things like porn consumption make people "fall away" from the faith, it turns out that porn and faith seem to have no real impact on one another: Edelman found that a 1% increase in churchgoing in a postal zip code was correlated with a 0.1% drop in porn subscription purchases on Sunday...but that purchases through the rest of the week brought up those zip codes to the average (or above).

It turns out that abstinence until late adulthood contributes to sexual dysfunction. Perhaps it's because they spend too much time watching porn to practice the real thing and their expectations are all out of whack with reality ;)

On the screwed up state of our legal system: part 2 - the war on sex

The Bush Administration has its own record of pulling agents away from terrorist task forces in order to go after porn. Not child porn, mind you, but legal, consentual adult porn. My take on porn is that it serves as a release and harmless escape for 99.9% of adults. Speaking of release, Time has an article from a few days ago about the pseudo-incestuous "Purity Ball" concept, beloved by the RR. It's sexist and creepy; the former as girls are targeted over boys and the latter as fathers pretend a daughter's vagina is theirs to take care of. Not that I haven't already put in $0.02 on that...

The sort of attitude that groups like the FRC foster is one of repression, which brings me to another point -- the correlation between homophobia in juveniles and homosexual behavior as adults.

A favorite talking point of the religious right is that the sexual saturation of our culture is dangerous, in that it leads to higher teen pregnancies, STDs, rape, pedophilia...&c. Facts be damned! John Stossel, not my favorite media character, absolutely pwns this idiot from the FRC, Peter Sprigg, about the facts surrounding rape, teen pregnancies and STDs. It occurs about 5 minutes into the video, and the guy is obviously fumbling and bumbling.

What I would like to know is if these guys are aware that the highest occurences of the things they warn against are right here in the Bible Belt, as I have meticulously documented. If anything, religiosity seems to correlate to deviant sexual behavior. Bet you won't hear that from them...although porn and religion have a lot in common!

Which is not to say there aren't problems that need resolving in our society regarding sex, especially the fact that the FBI estimates over 100,000 minors are involved in the US sex market. Just a few weeks ago, a child sex raid took down 300 scumbags and rescued 21 kids. It's very important that the resources available to stem the flow of underage prostitution, especially rescues, are advertised and heavily promoted.

A few faith-related notes

More from Mother Jones on the McCain-Hagee-Parsley connections.

A priest-cosmologist won the Templeton Prize. Although it's "faith-based", at least they distance themselves from ID.

Finally, the absurd policies of the Religious Right bear more rotten fruit: 1 in 4 teenage girls who are sexually active have at least one STD. There's also a sad race gap: more than one half of black girls have one, compared to only 20% of whites and Latinos. The teenagers themselves aren't in the least surprised. See an older piece of mine for more stats related to "abstinence only" education and abortions.

UPDATE: See this excellent item on the RR's policies of "marriage promotion" as well.

You probably won't hear this from them

A new study shows that sexual dysfunction is directly correlated to abstaining from sex until later in life. You probably won't hear about this from the "abstinence-only" crowd:

While past research has linked early sexual activity to health problems, a new study suggests that waiting too long to start having sex carries risks of its own.

Those who lose their virginity at a later age -- around 21 to 23 years of age -- tend to be more likely to experience sexual dysfunction problems later, say researchers at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute's HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies.

The study will appear in the January 2008 issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Men who lose their virginity in their 20s, in particular, seemed to be more likely to experience sexual problems that include difficulty becoming sexually aroused and reaching orgasm.

Who wants to bet that this study will be conveniently ignored by the RR? Keep in mind that this is the same crew who buried the government report showing the failure of their "wait until marriage" programs. As I said a few months ago, it isn't about the facts, but about religious control of people's sexual freedom:

Anti-choicers would do well to read up on the facts, and a new WHO study shows that abortion rates are highest in countries where it is illegal, and lowest in countries which have comprehensive sex ed programs and abundant contraception choices. Contrary to all the spin and stupidity, although the US is much more religious than European countries, we have higher rates of teen pregnancy, STDs and abortions than them. Why? Because the religiosity of our country blinds people to the reality that curtailing these things is only accomplished through sex ed for teens and widely-available contraceptive choices. In other words, if they really care about "saving" fetuses, they should be pushing contraception. Instead, they push failed "abstinence-only" policies that lead to more teen pregnancies and STDs. These people don't care about other people, just about controlling them.

In addition to that:

Faith-based programs are nothing but a sham to buy the votes of religious-right knuckle-draggers. These programs have no evidence to demonstrate their veracity, and in some cases, evidence to the contrary (i.e., "abstinence-only education" -- "According to a study released in March at the National STD Prevention Conference, 88 percent of 12,000 teenagers who took an abstinence pledge reported having sexual intercourse before they married. Although they delayed intercourse for up to 18 months, when they became sexually active, those who signed pledges were less likely to use condoms and less likely to seek medical help for STD infections than their peers.").

On the same topic -- 237 reasons why we "do it".

[we have] "a growing sense of confidence in our new attorney general."

Guess who said that? And guess why?

Before I tell you, I want to tell you that at the time this was said, the Iraq war was about 2.5 years old, and the first signs of Bush's plummeting popularity were beginning to show. Given that, an apropos offhand remark that also comes from the WaPo article in which the title quote is spoken sheds light on the priorities of this administration, and to whom they've pandered away all competence and credibility:

"I guess this means we've won the war on terror," said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity because poking fun at headquarters is not regarded as career-enhancing. "We must not need any more resources for espionage."

Among friends and trusted colleagues, an experienced national security analyst said, "it's a running joke for us."

Why did the FBI agent say this? Because the AG was diverting resources away from fighting terrorism in order...wait for it...

...to fight...

...porn.

Not child porn. Consenting adults, legal porn.

And the FRC -- the Religious Right's most powerful Washington lobbying arm -- was ecstatic, and they were the ones with the "growing sense of confidence" in Alberto Gonzalez. My how the times change.

This was enough of a priority of the Bush administration to pull good agents off of cases involving threats of death and destruction to our country in order to search out people who make erotica involving urination and bondage. This is your president, America. God bless that motherfucker.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Politics

COTG #49

The 49th edition of the Carnival of the Godless is up at Grounded in Reality.

Also, check out Chris Hallquist's take on the Brody Ruckus 3some Facebook fiasco, as well as the lovelygurl15 viral marketing scam (see her Youtube profile). It appears that more and more business-minded persons are seeing ways to take advantage of huge networking afforded by Facebook and Youtube and such to try to launch their businesses or careers.
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Technorati tags: COTG

The Evolution of Gay Animals (Including Humans)

There is a quite interesting article in SEED magazine about sexual selection and homosexual behavior in animals. The interview with Joan Roughgarden, an evolutionary biologist, examines the role of evolution in animal homosexual behavior. As usual, PZ Myers' trenchant analysis shines light on the relationship between sexual selection, homosexual behavior in animals, and evolutionary biology.

The major points/possibilities where these converge, which PZ analyzes:

1) Homosexuality is selectively neutral (in PZ's hilarious words, "Many heterosexual couples elect not to have children, and many homosexuals elect to have them. This shouldn't be a surprise; all it takes to start a baby is a few pokes and a spurt, and it really doesn't take much effort to overcome an inclination for such a brief event. We are sex-obsessed animals, so redirecting an ejaculation to a particular orifice isn't that astonishing.")
2) Homosexuality promotes community bonding (conflict avoidance = more survival)
3) Homosexuality is coupled to other advantageous traits (coupling)
4) Homosexuality is a product of weak genetic specification (e.g. "brains are plastic")
5) Homosexuality is a byproduct (e.g. developmental/environmental, not genetic)

Obviously, one or more of these has to be right. Hopefully, the more genetics becomes understood in its relationship to evo-devo, we can begin to attach hard data to these hypotheses.

The well-known gay behaviors in animals (read the SEED article for details) are often used to "justify" homosexual behavior. Without going into detail, I do think it is funny how people will fall into Moore's naturalistic fallacy in concluding moral behavior from observations in nature: "It happens in nature, therefore it's natural, therefore it's moral!" Of course, the problems with these arguments go far and wide, but the most obvious and gut-wrenching refutations hinge on the exploitation of this same illogic in genocides, Übermensch, and in Hitler-esque "survival of the fittest" mentalities.
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Technorati tags: Homosexual, Evolution, Biology