But concept art was not dead

Aliza Shvarts, an art major at Yale, issued a press release that she's due to present a project consisting of the blood and potential 1-2 weeks gestated embryos expelled when taking abortifacients after artificially inseminating herself.

Brilliantly, she now says she didn't do any tests to confirm whether or not there were actual embryos present. Judging from the reactions, this is one of the most successful instances of denying catharsis for artistic effect in a long time.

To really drive the nail in further, consider that embryos this early in gestation are likely to be too small to be reliably detected, so even if there is an exhibit of blood and someone buys it (for a hefty sum, I can only hope) to have it examined, there will be no definitive last word in the matter. She has not only succeeded in getting attention, she has succeeded in making pretty much everyone afraid, desperately screaming things like "GAME OVER" to make the bad thoughts go away.

Via Bitch PhD. There's a blog of the 'Dimensions' journal.

How theology is different from witchcraft

We've had the gender pronoun switcher regender for some time. Now Sam Harris picks up the search-and-replace and applies it to Terry Eagleton's Dakwins review, replacing 'theology' with, well, see for yourself:

This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of [conjuring and divination] that would make a first-year [sorcerer's apprentice] wince...Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and [witchcraft] are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates [witchcraft] from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake... while [belief in magic], rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it...

Sam Harris is of course the author of Letters to a Wiccan Nation. This redundant link exchange has been brought to you via Friendly Atheist.

This is so brilliant. I have to look into how easy it would be to create a regender-like web application to automate this sort of search-and-replace satire.

Hell yes

I could pull quotes from this all week. (This is nominally about that US congressman who was exploiting sixteen-year old interns.)

This terror is a complex of the sexualization of children and teenagers, and the violence directed against children and teenagers in the society.

In their view there is a vast homosexual conspiracy to infect youth with gay secular humanism. In short, the evangelical world sees a counter world – a Satanism of secularlism, that like themselves, infects people with exposure. [...] In the Manichean war, the forces of light and the forces of darkness engage in a race to reach, and save or corrupt, the unconverted.

For most of its history, until the late 1970s, the more evangelical one was, the more likely one was to be not involved in politics AT ALL--to see it as an inherently sinful realm.

—The Revolution Eats its Own, by Stirling Newberry. At last, recent history, and Team America: World Police, is beginning to come together to something coherent.

Ugly, but coherent.

Stay Clean, order yours today

This just in. Christian T-shirts to make sure you never accidentally touch a filthy Unclean who hath partaken in Meanness:

Wear this, and you'll know for certain whenever an Unclean comes near: for they will emit piercing wails, repelled by the pietous light of your unyielding righteousness.

Gentlewomen, stop your engines

To be a gentleman was a distinguished title. A gentleman shows restraint, he's refined, he does not resort to violence. The power of the gentleman comes from his restraint, and the fact that he can afford to show restraint; it comes from the things he could do but chooses not to. Men are presumed to be non-gentlemen by default.

Women are supposed to be all nice all the time, so they've never had access to this power; there is no such word as gentlewoman. Niceness is apparently only a virtue when it's backed by the potential for not being nice.

This is related to one of my main problems with redemption; namely, that it glorifies someone who did something bad first, and then stopped, more than it does someone who never did the bad thing to begin with.