Burger King introduces a “gay pride” burger, Christians worried that believers may consume one inadvertently

July 20, 2014 • 7:22 am

But why? Do they think it will turn them gay?

What with Hobby Lobby, Chick fil A, and other right-wing and/or religious businesses flaunting their faith or even enforcing it on employees, it’s good to see a chain—a big one—come out in favor of gay rights.

It’s Burger King, which, in early July, briefly sold a “Proud Whopper” in San Francisco (sadly, in only one store). Still, that’s something:

And KENS5, a San Antonio (Texas) news station reports:

The downtown San Francisco Burger King sold Proud Whoppers last weekend, during the parade and also passed out some 50,000 rainbow Burger King crowns, that were worn by parade participants and spectators. The video, created by the Miami office of Burger King’s ad agency David, captures customers discussing whether or not the burger, itself, is different. At $4.29 it costs the same as a conventional Whopper. And, indeed, customers ultimately discover the only difference is the rainbow wrap.

All Proud Whopper sandwich sales, Machado [head of BK international brand marketing] says, will be donated to the Burger King McLamore Foundation for scholarships benefiting LGBT high school seniors graduating in spring 2015.

Here’s the company’s video, which also includes a few people beefing about the burger:

Unsurprisingly, the American right just can’t leave this alone. The Raw Story reports some pushback from the odious American Family Association:

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer voiced his concern on Friday over the idea that a new Burger King item honoring LGBT Pride events in San Francisco could be sold in other parts of the country, Right Wing Watch reported.

“If this isn’t bottled up in San Francisco, this kind of nonsense, then it’s going to be spreading across the entire fruited plain,” Fischer complained. “And you’re going to be going to your Burger King in Des Moines, Iowa and you’re going to have a rainbow color wrapper for your Whopper.”

I can’t help but think that “fruited plain” (which comes from one line of the patriotic song “America the Beautiful“) is a sly and denigrating reference to gays, which in my youth used to be called “fruits” (pejoratively, of course).

The burger chain featured the “Proud Whopper” earlier this month at one San Francisco location, bearing rainbow-colored packaging and the phrase, “We are all the same inside” on the inside of the wrapper. The company also posted a video of people ordering and reacting to the promotion.

“I cried in there,” one woman said in the video. “A burger has never made me cry before.”

Fischer scoffed at the tearful reaction, and suggested that his group would try to do an “action alert” to protest to the company.

“I gotta tell you, I think this is a marketing mistake,” he said. “I think this is a bonehead move from a marketing standpoint. Because I gotta guarantee you, when people sit down to eat a hamburger, the last thing they want to be thinking about is two guys having sex.”

Yeah, as if that’s what they’d be thinking about. And I seriously doubt that Burger King has lost any business.

h/t: Ginger

I have landed

July 20, 2014 • 5:45 am

It was a long journey to Poland, as usual, with a half-hour drive closely following a two-hour train ride closely following a nine-hour plane flight. But I have at last landed in Dobryzyn, and am in the capable hands of Andrzej and Malgorzata, and in the capable paws of The Furry Princess of Poland. Oh, and there’s a black d*g, too (Cyrus), who is clearly in Canine Paradise after having been rescued from four years of hell in a pound. Cyrus thinks he’s in heaven now, but more on cat/d*g relations later.

The cherry harvest begins tomorrow, with 3,000 trees all needing to be picked by hand.(I wasn’t aware that cherries have to be picked individually.) I will document that, although I’m told that this is not a good year for cherries because of a late frost that killed many flowers. Still, there may be as many as 30 tons of cherries (a single good tree in a good year can produce 30 kg of the fruit).

Much of the documentations will be gustatory, as you see below:

A late lunch greeted me: cold borscht with a liberal sprinkling of fresh dill:

Followed by cherry pies with Malgorzata’s famous walnut crust:

There will be many more cherry-related foods to come.

And Her Highness, who has taken to sleeping on top of the towels in the bathroom. Can you spot the cat?

Sunday: Hili dialogue

July 20, 2014 • 12:34 am

Here’s Sunday morning’s Hili dialogue. Cherry pies and cats are waiting.

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m drinking milk while waiting for Jerry.
A: Jerry is not Godot, he will be here after 1 p.m.

In Polish:

Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Piję mleko, czekając na Jerrego.
Ja: Jerry nie Godot będzie po pierwszej.

Catholic biologist Ken Miller talks about God and evolution

July 19, 2014 • 10:28 am

Panda’s Thumb called my attention to an interview of biochemist, author, ID opponent, and theistic evolutionist Kenneth Miller from Brown University. Miller once described himself to me as an “observant Catholic.” Here he has a 33-minute conversation with Samuel Varg (see below), who asks him several penetrating questions about God and evolution.

Panda’s Thumb author Matt Young notes:

While searching for the source of this cartoon, I ran across the website of Samuel Varg, a Swedish magician and skeptic. Mr. Varg has posted an interview with Kenneth Miller on YouTube and promises interviews with Candida Moss and John Safran.

Mr. Varg and his colleague Anders Hesselbom were unusually well prepared. Professor Miller, in turn, was an excellent spokesperson for theistic evolution, though I had to take issue with his claim that the universe is “overflowing” with the possibility for life. His position seems to me to be very close to deism, but you can listen to the interview and decide for yourself.

Here Miller espouses theistic evolution, making some arguments that I find dubious, especially for someone who, as he says, is an exponent of science and reason. (Miller also talks about the Dover trial, in which he played a large role in keeping Intelligent Design out of American public schools.) It’s well worth listening to all 33 minutes of this:

Miller speaks well, and it’s interesting to hear how an intelligent and eloquent scientist manages to justify theistic evolution. Miller begins by citing—unfortunately—Aquinas and Augustine on the issue of how “natural phenomena don’t take god out of the picture.” (If you’ve read them, you’ll know that’s not exactly true, for those theologians firmly believed in supernatural phenomena like Paradise, Adam and Eve, Noah’s flood, and inherited original sin.)

He then goes on to make a sort of god-of-the-gaps argument, asking, “Why do we live in a universe that is simply overflowing with evolutionary possibilities for life?” Miller’s answer is that “We live in a world that was fashioned by an intelligent creator who intended to have a process of evolution that would give rise to the beauty and the diversity of life—our own species included.” In other words, he’s making a virtue of necessity, for he admits that many religious people dislike evolution because it tells us we’re nothing special (and we’re not!). The interpretation of a naturalistic process as reflecting God’s plan is Miller’s form of theistic evolution. But there are some exceptions: Miller has stated (as he does in this video) that the universe appears fine-tuned for life, and in his first book he suggested that God worked directly in evolution by His undetectable quantum-mechanical manipulation of particles.

It is telling, though, that Miller’s own Sophisticated Theology™ is completely at odds with other Sophisticated Theologians™ who constantly tell me that everybody who truly understands God sees Him as a Ground of Being, whose presence is essential for sustaining all things. Miller appears to reject this. He explains that, though he’s a theist, he doesn’t see God as having to do any sustaining: he says a real God would have created a universe like ours that works without his intervention, and “sustains itself.” But the universe sustains itself, as Miller says it does by simply following natural (though God-decreed) law, then God cannot be a Ground of Being without whom the universe couldn’t exist.

Miller also broaches God as the answer to why Earth was able to evolve “reflective, self-aware, intelligent life,” another common argument for God by science-friendly theists. I deal with this question in my book: was the evolution of such life really inevitable? My answer is “We don’t know, but I doubt it.”

At about 9:30 in, Miller implies that the book of Genesis is wrong, and is seen literally only by fundamentalists and atheists (who decry the fundamentalists but attack religion as if all of it were based on pure literalism). Yet Miller’s own Catholic Church insists that Adam and Eve were real people who were the ancestors of all human beings. I’d love to ask him if he thinks that Adam and Eve are fictional characters.

At about 23 minutes in, Miller admits that he has had some doubts about God, based on the problem of evil in the world, and adds that he changed his mind several times about religion but, in the end, always came back to God. I’d like to hear his own take on the existence of “natural” evils like childhood cancers and deaths from natural disasters.

At 29 minutes in, Miller is asked whether he thinks Jesus walked on water and turned water into wine. He waffles a bit, saying he “does not know,” but adds that the Bible might simply include fictional tales concocted to highlight Jesus’s teachings. As a Christian, Miller says that, to him, “It doesn’t matter.” Miller adds that he sees Jesus as divine and as “saviour of the world.” That being the case, Varg should immediately have asked him if he thought Jesus was resurrected from the dead. I don’t think Miller would have been on as firm a ground if he had said that that, too, might just have been just a story to underscore Jeus’s “teachings”. For if Miller really thought that, he would be flying in the face of very important Church dogma, and in fact could hardly call himself a Catholic. (If Jesus wasn’t crucified and resurrected, on what grounds do we consider him saviour of the world? And isn’t a denial of the Resurrection a heresy?)

At any rate, the interview shows a religious scientist walking the fine line between theism and deism. This line was depicted by reader Pliny the In Between at his website Pictoral Theology:

Readers’ wildlife photographs

July 19, 2014 • 9:04 am

Marsupials in Canada? Reader Michael sent some photos with a short note:

Some animal photos I took recently (wallabies, young emus, and prairie dogs) near Kelowna, B.C.

Does anybody know what species of wallaby this is? Some day I will go to Australia (I’ve never been) and see these things.

DSCN1847

Why are young emus striped? (Indeed, I think most young ratites have bizarre patterns.) We can of course make up explanations based on camouflage, but I don’t think any of them have been tested.

The one indigenous mammal in this lot: a prairie dog (genus Cynomys). Does anyone know the species?

Weekly reader beefs

July 19, 2014 • 6:46 am

For some reason, most of the non-published comments this week came from evolution deniers, although, as usual, a few trickled in from outraged citizens of Lebanon, Missouri. Here’s a selection of four that didn’t make it to prime time.

Reader “Jimmy” comments on “Baleen whales: a lovely transitional form“:

What a load of old cods!!! With this kind of logic anything can be advertised as transitional, absolute rubbish! There should be literally millions of transitional forms if Evolution is true, why do we not find them? If you cant get past the basic start of life ie life from non-life why do you carry on with this fantasy? Life cannot start with Oxygen present, Life cannot exist with Oxygen present, sort that out! Dont bother replying I will be out back digging up some extinct creature and passing it off as a transitional form somewhat smarter than the average member of the Evolution Church!!

Cheers

We have gazillions of transitional forms; are they all to be ignored or discounted? But really, what is this talk about “old cods” (I suppose he means “codswallop“): claiming that life cannot exist with oxygen present? How does that discount that life started in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment and, after evolved forms produced oxygen, had to subsequently evolve in that new environment. Does this person not know about adaptation to environmental change.

This kind of willful ignorance—and it is willful since the evidence is readily available—is what we’re up against in the U.S. I could show Jimmy hundreds of transitional forms, including the feathered dinosaur I highlighted a few days ago—and he’d still reject them all. Any bets on whether he’s religious?

*****

Reader “tom” comments on “What would disprove evolution?”

The tree of life is a tidy little concept,intuitive, reasonable,rational, it fully satisfies anyone who has no real interest in thinking much less in verification of fact. In reality there is not even a sniff of proof of any component of the evolution hypothesis. On the other hand anyone who tries to comprehend the sheer statistical probability that a strand of RNA can randomly arrange itself in such a manner as to contain information to build a protein soon comes face to face with cold reality. Ribose is a sugar, an organic molecule which can only be produced by photosynthesis. All attempts to artificially induce its formation have met with failure. To assume this can be realized randomly in pond water is the zenith of stupidity. No attempt to synthesize or induce such synthesis have ever succeeded for any complex molecule associated with creation of a living cell or organism. So given the absence of the most basic components of even RNA, how can a reasonable mind mind conclude it could ever appear via abiogenesis?
Our current understanding of the universe is embryonic at this stage and for people to force fraudulent claims on others as proven science, is a dissevrice to science,and humanity.

Again, we see a flat denial here of evolution—by the same people who gladly take antibiotics whose efficacy is supported by the same kind and degree of scientific evidence that evolution occurred. There’s also the willful and pervasive misunderstanding that the primordial replicating molecule (possibly RNA) “randomly arranged itself.” Of course that wasn’t random: even the original molecules, as Addy Pross shows in his nice book What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology, natural selection had to act on those early precursors, which means that they weren’t assembled “randomly.”

One of the most common tropes of creationists is this: “you haven’t yet created life in the lab yet, and have no idea how it happened.” And yes, that’s a puzzle for the time being.

But I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to create replicating molecules in the lab under primitive Earth-like conditions within a century. What will they say then? Probably this: “Well, you don’t know that it happened that way!” And yes, we won’t, but it doesn’t matter. If we can show that life originated under purely naturalistic conditions, that destroys the creationist argument for God based on the fact that life couldn’t have originated naturalistically.

And beyond that, of course, once it did originate, we have tons of evidence for evolution once early organisms were present. I believe I wrote a book on that evidence. How do creationists deal with that? I suppose they’d say, “Well, yes, evolution might have occurred after God created the first living thing, but that first thing had to be created.” But no creationist says that, not even advocates of Intelligent Design. They fall back on our present ignorance of how life began only because we have so much evidence that once it did begin, it evolved. In other words, they’re using the origin of life as a god-of-the-gaps argument.

*****

Reader “Brent Dawes” comments on “OMG: a three-ton wombat!”

Why Evolution is True?

You have presented Diprotodon as being a giant marsupial wombat the biggest marsupial to inhabit our planet. And yet it’s “descendants” appear to have lost information to the point where they are less than 100cm long. This happened right across Australia where the megafauna mammals were giant compared to their contemporaries today. Overall a loss in genetic information and no proof of evolution what so ever. The same goes for the whole evolutionary “theory” which has revealed no examples of any evolution amongst species ever, only wishful thinking and speculation by “scientists” who are looking in the wrong direction, down, when they should be looking up.

Now there’s a new one one me: a reduction in body size represents a loss of information!? Well, what about those creatures that got larger, like nearly all mammals compared to the early ones? But leaving that aside, I’m not sure how a reduction of body size clearly represents a “loss of genetic information.” It represents a loss of mass. But that loss could It could epresent a gain of information, if a reduction in body size came from the acquisition of new genes.

The canard that evolution has given no evidence for “new genetic information” is, of course, dead wrong, for we have examples of both new genetic information originating in real time (see here for some of that), as well as of historical evidence based on gene duplication, whereby duplicated genes diverge in function and assume new functions. Our different kinds of hemoglobin genes (alpha, beta, gamma, and so on) all do different things, yet all descended from one ancestral gene. There are many such gene families, all descended from a common ancestor and all diverging after duplication to do different things. If that’s not “the origination of new genetic information,” I don’t know what is. We also have the work of my colleague Manyuan Long here at Chicago, and of David Begun at the University of California at Davis, showing that in the fruit fly Drosophila new genes doing new things originate very quickly, and those genes are often cobbled together from other genes scattered throughout the genome. Evolution can do strange things!

And finally we hear this cry from Mr Dawes, equivalent to his saying proudly, “I am ignorant!”: “The same goes for the whole evolutionary ‘theory’ which has revealed no examples of any evolution amongst species ever, only wishful thinking and speculation by ‘scientists.’” (Why is “scientists” in scare quotes? Don’t we exist?) This isn’t the nice kind of ignorance which simply reflects lack of acquaintance with the evidence, but the deliberate and dark kind of ignorance: ignoring the mountain of existing evidence for evolution. It’s not stupidity, but intellectual malfeasance.

*****

Finally, reader “Diest” (somehow I think it’s supposed to be “Deist”) comments on “A warning to Lebanon, Missouri: another state high school successfully sued for promoting religion“:

Why do you even care about what was said? I just want to know how you can you hate God/Gods a different religion so much if you dont believe is true.. If you agree disagree or think God exists or doesnt how can you hate it…. If you dont believe its real or anything is true, how can you disagree with something you dont believe even exists to begin with?

1. Why do I care? Because of the Constitution.
2. I don’t hate God, because you can’t hate something that doesn’t exist. I dislike the idea of God because it’s deceived so many people and thereby promoted a lot of bad things on our planet.

That comment shows that people like “Diest” don’t have the slightest notion of what atheism really is.

Caturday felids: Chessie the railroad kitten

July 19, 2014 • 4:37 am

If you live in the U.S. and are of a certain age, you might know about “Chessie” the railroad cat: the symbol of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. Or you might have simply seen this symbol on the side of a train, without knowing what it was (it’s on the train right below):

It is in fact a kitten sleeping soundly on a pillow. I suppose it’s not a good graphic if you can’t recognize what it is instantly, but once you know you always get an “aww” feeling when you see it.

Chessie was created in 1933, and you can read about the origin of the logo at Wikipedia, or , more comprehensively, at the Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society. See her on the engine below? (As you’ll see below, Chessie was a female.)

From Wikipedia:

Chessie was a popular cat character used as a symbol of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. Derived from an etching by Viennese artist Guido Gruenwald, the image first appeared in a black and white advertisement in the September 1933 issue of Fortune magazine with the slogan “Sleep Like a Kitten.” The advertisement makes no mention of the cat’s name.

Here’s that ad (the video below says that the railroad purchased the right to use the drawing for only $5!):

60420022

When the ad generated a positive response, the railroad developed an advertising campaign around the image and chose the name Chessie as a derivation of the railroad’s name. The promotion proved widely popular and, in addition to national print advertising, grew to include calendars, clothing, and even two children’s books about the character. Chessie acquired two kittens named “Nip” and “Tuck” in 1935, as well as a mate named “Peake” in 1937. During World War II, the Chessie character was used to promote War Bonds and support for the war effort, depicted as working on the home front to support Peake, who was off to war. The Chessie image continued to appear in advertising until 1971 when passenger train travel was consolidated under Amtrak.

Here are two pictures of Chessie, Nip, and Tuck. I guess since there’s a proud father in the first one, Chessie’s a female! There’s a remarkable family resemblance.

The video below says that Chessie’s mate was named “Peake” (Chesapeake—get it?), and the accompanying drawing suggests he was a hobo moggie taken off a coal car. You can see his name in the ad right above:

Peake goes to war in a WWII calendar (from Red Slipper Diary). Note that Peake, like Hili, has a white stripe up his nose, which Chessie lacks, so you know this is the male. He’s getting a medal for being a brave cat:

Of course there’s a YouTube video (be sure to see the sleeping kitten at 1:45):

You can buy old Chessie ads or reproductions of classic Chessie calendars here,; and here’s an example of a calendar page:

A prayer for Chessie!

And another reproduction ad, which you can buy on Etsy (I’ve fixed the spelling):

This delightful art print is from a old calendar to advertise the Chesapeake Ohio Railroad… Chessie cat was their advertising cat they used to promote the idea that you would sleep like a kitten when you traveled on their railroad..This is a rare print of Peake Cat…He was Chessie’s old man as they said at that time, and Chessie was his favorite pin-up girl…. and he went off to war and was a war hero…Here he is wearing his military hat and backpack..In this picture he is reading a letter from Chessie saying that “We eagarly await your return from war and here at home we’re doing all we can to hasten that day”…This was the same sentiment that many family members had at that time when a family member was away at war…

After all that, doesn’t this look familiar? It’s Hili!

*******

Today, Chessie no longer appears in timetables or on locomotives and rail cars, but she nevertheless is alive in the hearts of millions who grew up during her life’s work on the C&O and successor lines. Interest in her and her history is perhaps as great now as when she was the foremost advertiser of rail passenger service.

But you can still occasionally see Chessie on old railroad cars or on railroad bridges, and I always smile when I see that.

For the complete and detailed history of Chessie’s long career the COHS recommends the book Chessie, The Railroad Kitten, available online from chessieshop.com.

You can buy Chessie merchandise here, including a swell tee-shirt and a coffee mug. You can buy vintage Chessie ads here.

Saturday: Hili dialogue

July 19, 2014 • 2:31 am

This one came with a title: “The limits of friendship”:

Cyrus: We have to give some thought…
Hili: To what?
Cyrus: Whether we could eat from the same bowl.
Hili: It’s out of the question. It would be indecent: my food is better.

in Polish:

Cyrus: Musimy się zastanowić…
Hili: Nad czym?
Cyrus: Nad tym, czy nie możemy jeść z jednej miski.
Hili: Wykluczone, to byłoby nieprzyzwoite, moje jedzenie jest lepsze.

	Debi on Jesse Singal on the ridiculous…
	Mark Sturtevant on Bill Maher on gender apartheid
	Mike on Bill Maher on gender apartheid
	Laingholm on Jesse Singal on the ridiculous…
	Emily on Bill Maher on gender apartheid