ONE OF JERRY COYNE'S READERS

As one of the 61,000+ readers of Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True website, I decided to accept his invitation to participate in his Photos of Readers series.  Here is the post, and original found here:
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Do send in a photo or two of yourself doing something interesting or characteristic of your life. We have, after all, more than 61,000 readers!

Today’s Featured Reader is Douglas Swartzendruber (on the left in the picture), who sent a food-related photo and the caption below:


When thinking about favorite activities, many things came to mind from trail running [Pikes Peak and the Garden of the Gods] to basketball playing [still get in two nights a week] to acoustic jams with friends [a plug here for Colorado Roots Music Camp] to traveling, but the picture shows an activity that our family has enjoyed for over 70 years – barbecuing chicken.

On our northern Indiana farm, we raised corn, wheat and chicken – a lot of Leghorns, tens of thousands per year. The early bbqs were made out of oil drums cut in half, but the square-bottom ones shown are much more efficient with an even charcoal fire. The grills are stainless steel and make for easy turning of 20-25 halves per grill. For big events we would have up to 10 grills going. The sauce is a fairly simple mix of water, vinegar, butter, Worcestershire and seasonings, with the bbq technique being turning every minute or two with ample application of sauce after each turn. Another technique that is important – note that Slugger and I have our arms crossed in such a manner that we are turning the chicken in the same direction!

COMMANDER IN CHEAT

 

For a very long time, sportswriter Rick Reilly has made me laugh with his insightful story telling. Reilly has a new book, Commander in Cheat:  How Golf Explains Trump, and the Denver Post ran a column about the book, Trump and his cheating at golf - humorous but also disturbing.  Here is the story:

Rick Reilly to Trump: Let’s golf
Colorado native’s book, “Commander in Cheat,” just released
The Denver Post
7 Apr 2019
By Matt Bonesteel

  Elsa, Getty Images

Sportswriter Rick Reilly has challenged President Trump to a golf match.

We haven’t heard much from sportswriter Rick Reilly since he wrote his last ESPN.COM column in 2014 and last appeared on the network itself in 2016, but he’s been keeping busy, most notably with writing “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump,” which was released last week.

Based on the advance notice and a Golf.com excerpt, the book is about exactly what its title suggests: that Trump’s extremely casual attitude toward the rules of the game are a reflection on his presidency as a whole.

Reilly — a Boulder native who attended the University of Colorado, a onetime Denver Post sportswriter — is making the promotional rounds as the book goes on sale, making a Tuesday appearance on MSNBC. And if there’s one surefire way to sell a book, it’s to challenge the sitting president of the United States to a $100,000 golf match.

“I want to play him,” Reilly said. “I think I’m a 4.5 (handicap). He’s a 2.8. If he plays the 2.8, I’ll play him for 100 grand, (with the money going to) either of our charities. But the rule is, we can’t play his course, we can’t use his cheating caddies and there’s gotta be a rule guy with each of us, and I’ll play him all day.”

“He cheats like a Mafia accountant,” Reilly said. “He cheats crazy, he cheats whether you’re watching or not, he cheats whether you like it or not. He tried to cheat Tiger Woods in a match, Tiger hits it like this, he hits two balls in the water, doesn’t count either and pretends that he almost tied Tiger Woods. So it doesn’t matter whohe is, he has to be the winner.

“What really bothers me is that he told people on the campaign trail ... he said: ‘I’m a winner, you gotta vote for me because I’ve won 18 club championships’ — he says this three or four times — ‘and that’s against the best players in the club.’ But I knew he was lying because he told me how he does it. Whenever he opens a new course that he buys, he plays the first round by himself and calls that the club championship, puts his name on the wall.”

Reilly also said Trump tells his courses to award him the club championship because of a score he shot at an entirely different course, and that he claims club championships when they’re really the senior club championships.

Trump won his latest claimed club championship — his 20th — last year at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., but Golf.com’s Michael Bamberger discovered that it only came about after Trump challenged that year’s actual club champion — Ted Virtue, the CEO of a New York investment firm — to a nine-hole match-play contest, which Trump won and thus declared himself co-champion (though a plaque on his locker lists him as the sole winner).

The president’s oncourse cheating has been well-documented, even before Reilly’s book came out, a notion that has not been dispelled by a number of his famous playing partners:

• Suzann Pettersen, LPGA pro: “He cheats like hell. So I don’t know how he is in business. They say if you cheat at golf, you cheat at business. I’m pretty sure he pays his caddie well, since no matter how far into the woods he hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there.”

• Actor Samuel L. Jackson, when asked who was the better golfer: “Oh, I am, for sure. I don’t cheat.” Jackson also alleged in 2015 that one of Trump’s golf clubs tries to bill him for membership fees even though he was not a member.

• Alice Cooper, 1970s shock-rocker and noted golf enthusiast: “The worst celebrity golf cheat? I wish I could tell you that. It would be a shocker. I played golf with Donald Trump one time. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Trump, who many admit actually does have some skill as a golfer, has denied just about all of that.

In his 2004 book “Who’s Your Caddy?” Reilly told tales of caddying for the “great, near great, and reprobates of golf.” One of those people (the latter category, one has to assume) was a pre-presidency Donald Trump, a round Reilly was asked about in 2015 by The Post’s Ben Terris.

“Reilly told The Washington Post about an afternoon when Trump wrote down scores he didn’t actually achieve on his scorecard, conceded putts to himself by raking the ball into the hole with his putter rather than striking it properly (‘He rakes like my gardener!’), and even called a gimme — something a player might claim for a two-foot putt — on what should have been a chip shot,” Terris wrote.

“‘He took the world’s first gimme chip-in,’ Reilly said. At one point, Trump, after taking a number of second shots, told Reilly to ‘make sure you write that I play my first ball. You don’t get a second ball in life.’ In life, it may or may not be true that a person gets a second chance; and yet, as Reilly wrote, on holes 1, 13 and 17, Trump did indeed get a second ball.”

Responded Trump, then running for president: “I always thought he was a terrible writer. I absolutely killed him, and he wrote very inaccurately. I would say that he’s a very dishonest writer . ... I never took a gimme chip shot ... I don’t do gimme chip shots. If I asked his approval, that’s not cheating, number one. Number two, I never took one.”

 

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I tend to agree with those who say "If you cheat at golf, you will cheat at anything." I don't need to recount all of the ways that Trump is a cheater, but below is the ultimate reason why any discerning voter should not support Trump!!!!

CHRISTIANITY TODAY?

This poem may rankle some folks, but I found it to be thought-provoking and truthful in many ways. The poem and comments can be found here.

THE EXODUS

by

Dave Barnhart

I have seen your religion, and I hate it.
I have heard your doctrine, and I loathe it.
Take away your empty praise songs,
your vacuous worshiptainment.
Your mouth is full of religious words,
but your proverbs are salted manure.


“The sick deserve to be sick.
The poor deserve to be poor.
The rich deserve to be rich.
The imprisoned deserve to be imprisoned.”
Because you never saw him sick, or poor, or in prison.


“If he had followed police instructions,
if he had minded the company he keeps,
he would not have been killed,”
You say in the hearing
of a man hanging on a cross
between two thieves.


“People who live good lives
do not have pre-existing conditions,” you say,
carving these words over the hospital door:
“Who sinned, this man or his parents,
that he was born blind?”


“It is the church’s job, not the government’s,”
say you fat sheep,
defending your fat shepherds,
shoving and butting with shoulders and horns,
while you foul the water,
grass,
and air,
and scatter the hungry sheep.


You watch the melting glaciers and say to the waves of the sea,
“this far shall you come, and no farther,”
as if your will could change the weather,
as if your will could be done in the heavens as it is on this earth,
as if you could drill the sky the way you drill the soil.


In your telling,
in the story of the starving of the five thousand,
there are not twelve baskets collected of left-over food;
In your story, God’s abundance becomes scarcity,
and the crowds devour each other.
“Send them into the villages to buy food,”
and let the Invisible Hand’s miracle of the free market sort them out,
the worthy from the unworthy,
while you eat the two fish and five pieces of bread
volunteered by a child.
These ungrateful poor,
the welfare queens
with their anchor babies,
stop before your disciples’ raised palms;
they hear you say,
“The Master cannot be bothered to bless your children.”


You see Hannah drunk,
and you jail her for fetal endangerment.


Like Haman, you hide behind the skirts of the king;
you make laws and pay bribes
that allow vigilante violence
and private discrimination
against those you hate,
sheltering underneath plausible deniability.
“It’s not a Muslim ban,” you say one day.
“It’s about religious liberty,” you say another.


This Bible you wave, this word you claim,
it is sharper than any two-edged sword.
You wield it poorly; it slices you on the backstroke.
You know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.
You tie up heavy yokes for others
whose burdens you do not bear,
but you will not lift a finger to help them.
To some you say, “Do not marry, but burn.”
You lock them out of the kingdom of God.
You cross sea and land for your missionary work,
and teach others to be as hateful as you.


Your kingdom is not the public park of Zechariah,
where children play in the streets
and old men and women lean on their canes for very age.
It is not the land where every fearless household
has its own vine and fig tree,
their own means of production and shade for their rest.
It is not the land where everyone has a home.
Your kingdom is the one with gates,
where homeless beggars have their sores licked by dogs,
where people who have the audacity to grow old
pay a premium for their insolence.
Like Ahab, you covet all the vines, all the fig trees,
letting your domain stretch as far as your eye can see,
adding house to house and field to field
until, in your gentrified land
there is room for no one but you and yours.
Like Pharaoh, you call those who refuse you “Lazy, lazy.”
You build walls, and walls, and walls, and walls,
and you stuff your ears to the sound of protest songs
that will shake those walls down.


I have seen your christ, and he is my antichrist.
He is the herald of a violent god,
a god of fertility but not fruitfulness,
a god of embryos but not emancipation, pro-birth and anti-life,
a god of war and retribution but not of justice,
a god of order but not of peace,
a god of might but not of mercy,
a god of marriage but not of love,
a god of sex but not of pleasure,
a god of platitudes but not of wisdom,
a god of work but not of sabbath,
a god who demands sacrifice from the poor but luxury and reward for Pharaoh.


Your religion is the religion of pyramids pointed heavenwards,
towers built to reach the heavens.
Supported by their flat base, built by slave labor,
they are stable monuments to wealth and death.
You fill their secret rooms with gold so that
in the afterlife,
you may cross to paradise
on the backs of the oppressed,
and live in forgetful pleasure for eternity.
Your gilded gospel is rusty ruin.


You are why the ancient Hebrews
seldom talked about an afterlife,
weary as they were of working
for Egypt’s dead heaven.
Your idols and your religion
are why those slaves left the yoke of heaven,
the land of binding,
for a wide wilderness,
for a nameless, faceless God
who told them they—even they—
were made in God’s image.
You are why your churches are empty
of those who love and believe in freedom.
You are why the Gentiles blaspheme the name of God.
You are the reason for the Exodus.


And if you pursue, may God throw you into the sea.
And the horse you rode in on.


References:
Amos 5:21-24
Luke 14:34-35
Matthew 25:31-46
Luke 23:33
John 9:1-12
Ezekiel 34
Job 38:11
Matthew 13:14-21
Matthew 19:13-15
1 Samuel 1:12-20
Esther 3:8-11
Hebrews 4:12
Matthew 22:9
Matthew 23:13-26
1 Corinthians 7:9
Zechariah 8:4
Micah 4:4
Isaiah 65:21-25
Luke 16:19-31
1 Kings 21
Isaiah 5:8
Exodus 5:17
Joshua 6
Genesis 11:1-9
Exodus 15:21

ISLAMOPHOBIA?

I think not.  What most of us worry about are the crazies of any stripe who believe that it is their duty to kill those who do not believe as they do or disobey their "law".  And it seems clear to me that Islam has a much higher percentage of adherents who believe that murder is their calling, bringing honor and glory to their prophet, god and themselves.  I copy below a recent comment by reader BES, and simply say hear, hear.

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UPDATE:

Since this string of postings, we've seen sustained, if not elevated European terror attacks, now being met with sympathy for the nation of islam and fears that it may be offended by any accusatory remarks. “Islamaphobia” is suddenly part of the auto-response lexicon.

This, in spite of the fact that the islamic state claims responsibility for these actions. Tons of hypocrisy outpouring from every corner, including elitist celebrities who espouse "peace, love and no walls" spewed from...behind fortified walls.

Bear in mind that 90% of terrorism is muslim on muslim. But that ranks up there with the ubiquitous Vietnam body counts we heard on the CBS nightly news. I have tried, unsuccessfully in the past, to engage any muslims on their rank and file silence over the wholesale slaughter of non-believers. Crickets.

My college roommate, also a journalist by trade, recently did a Ted Talk on what we’re all really selling these days: Hope and Fear. Hope for something better, vs. Fearing something worse. In the case of islam, it’s entirely fear based. Fear of not going to heaven. Fear of irking allah. Fear of being stoned, beheaded or maimed for the slightest infraction. The irony of putting Saudi Arabia on the human rights panel at the UN does not escape me.

Is it any wonder that a handful of ruthless barbarians, barely armed, can blow into any sandbox on abandoned American military vehicles, terrorize the populace into submission, leave and return only to find them just as submissive? That is fear at the cult level. Is islam nothing more than a deranged cult?

My fear is that when we finally wake up and realize religion is not a race and we’re not racists for opposing a fear based cult that has openly and repeatedly declared war on all non-believers, it will be too late. Orlandos and San Bernardinos will be our new normal. Those events were just the demo. The full feature is due out any moment.

We were told decades ago who the enemy is and advised to prepare. But we didn’t. Too distracted by bread and circuses. And marshaled forward on decades of bad and failed foreign policy. Also, the irony of refugees fleeing bombed out cities and countries, seeking better conditions…would only appear to be more savages seeking intact buildings and fresh victims to destroy. Any guesses as to why a significant portion of refugees seem to be men of fighting age, 18-34?

Good fences make good neighbors. Just like solid doors make restful nights.
 

ALONE BUT NOT LONELY

 

 

I recently re-read a reflection [I'll call it a poem] that a friend sent to me a number of years ago.  He has stood strong against a variety of challenges, including the way-too-early loss of his wife to cancer.  Some of you may find the poem dark, but I find it thought-provoking, and in it, many things  to which I can relate.  My suggestion is to read it aloud, and then let me know what you think.

I walk every morning at 3:30 am out my back door, through the pastures over the fence and down Bar X road. It heads straight north. I walk that stretch (4.4 miles) 7 days a week at the same time every morning. It teaches me brutal wind and fierce cold and sometimes driving snow and ice and, how these are places where the hearts of men sometimes go.

It reminds me how very alone I am.

Alone but not lonely.

A choice I have made and a price I pay when I am misunderstood.

These days seem to stretch into an eternity of highway.
I love the highway just as I love the forest. It never gives up.
It humbles my arrogance.

This thing at work, it is so far away from me when I am home with my family, or when I'm cutting wood or walking on Bar X.

Why so many feel obligated to fear the wanderer I think I know.
They fear the freedom of being alone and what they perceive it must do to your fortress of the soul.

As Lent falls on this dark night I feel alone but not abandoned.
I feel love of life all the more when things get bad.

I will survive.

We (my little family without a wife or mother)...will survive.
That's all that matters

It's a comfort to know there is a rationality to emotion.

John Lennon said it with clarity:

"Love is all you need"

 

HOW TRUMP WINS THE PRESIDENCY

 

I reprint here a letter to the editor by Bruce Driver that appeared March 9 in the Boulder Daily Camera:


There is a very scary scenario for Democrats this year leading to a resounding presidential-election defeat this fall. It goes like this:

1. Trump gradually softens his positions on key issues, including immigration, and lowers his bombast — already happening.

2. Trump turns out to be a skillful tactician — has already showed this.

3. He continues attracting used-to-be Democratic voters and non-voters to vote Republican — already wildly successful at this.

4. The great majority of Republican office holders unites behind him, Romney's attack notwithstanding — this will happen when they acknowledge how many new voters Trump has attracted to the party.

5. He secures the nomination — very likely.

6. Hillary and Bernie slug it out, but Hillary wins in part because of super-delegates, deeply annoying Bernie supporters — already happening.

7. Many Bernie supporters will not be mollified and, with other can't-be- bothered-to-vote Dems staying at home in the fall elections, Dem turnout is low while Republican turnout is high.

8. Hillary's negatives will remain during the campaign, discouraging moderates and independents from voting for her — good chance of this.

9. Trump wins going away next fall — good chance of this.

Please, please show me that this is unlikely.

Bruce Driver
Boulder

To me, this sounds like a distinct possibility

REMEMBERING BARRY PIERCE - DAVID A RIVES

In 2013, I published a tribute to G. Barry Pierce that had been previously published in a journal.  In the comments section of that post, I noted the recent passing of Barry, and his obituary can be read here.  Several folks have emailed me with a few thoughts about Barry, and one fellow left his phone number in the comments section, asking to chat sometime.  I called David Rives and we had a long conversation with recollections of Barry.  I asked David if he would write something, and he obliged with several comments in the original post.  They are combined here - Thank you David.
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Great talking with you yesterday, Doug.

As mentioned: in my senior year at Michigan, majoring in Cellular Biology, about to enter Michigan Medical School, my instructor in Cell Physiology lab came up to me one day and said, "Barry Pierce is giving a lecture this afternoon. Wanna go?", to which I answered "Sure."

Sat through the hour-long lecture -- on teratocarcinoma, naturally -- then, the next day, went to visit Dr. Pierce in his office in the Path Dept. "basement" (i.e., ground floor).

"Can I help you?" he said.

"Yes. My name is David Rives. I'm majoring in Cell Biology. I've taken a lot of biology classes, and chemistry classes, and physics classes and math classes."

"Yes?"

"Also, I'm a pretty smart guy."

"And?"

"Well, I sat through your entire lecture yesterday, on teratocarcinoma--?"

"Yes?"

"And...well...I didn't understand a word you said!"

"So?"

"So, therefore, I will have to go to work for you this Summer -- if for no other reason than to do whatever it takes to, in fact, understand what the hell you said!"

To which the great doctor smiled and shook his head. "Well, I've never had anyone ask for a job that way, so I guess I'll have to hire you! What day do you graduate?"

"May 5th."

"Fine, then you'll start the following Monday."

Which I did.

As it happens, in addition to Michigan Med, I had also been accepted to Washington University in St. Louis, and the UC Med School in San Francisco. However, all I'd ever wanted to do with my medical education was: cure cancer. Which I was now about to do -- working for one of this country's three ACS Lifetime Professors!

Which meant I no longer "needed" Wash U or UC. So, I told both of them what they could do with my acceptance.

Well, I start work in Dr. Pierce's lab. Naturally, my first question, to one of my labmates is: "So, 
where, exactly, is the 'Cancer Cure' department in this rather extensive laboratory?" 

"Oh, he says,"you don't know?"

"Know what?"

"We don't do that anymore." 

"Excuse me?!"

"I said--"

"No, I heard that. But what do you mean, 'you don't do that anymore'?"

"Exactly what I said: We don't do that anymore. We do 'basement membrane' instead."

"'Basement membrane'?"

"That's right: Dr. Pierce is looking for a way to alter basement membrane."

"What the hell for?!"

"Oh, because he thinks we might be able to cure kidney disease that way -- you know, glomerulonephritis and the like."

So, there I stood, chafing at the bit to cure cancer, figuring I had accidentally stumbled on the best way to do that (I mean, the guy had his OWN ELECTRON MICROSCOPE, for God's sake, and was thinking of ordering another, at a time when the entire Michigan Biology Dept. was trying to figure out how to get their FIRST!); having told two other pretty good medical schools -- that featured curricula I'd DROOLED over -- to "kiss off; I've got what I was looking for," with the full knowledge that the medical school I WOULD be going to -- the University of Michigan -- was among the worst, education-wise, in the country, no matter what "reputation" they may have garnered outside Ann Arbor -- there I stood, with all of that going on, only to be told, "Oh, we don't do that anymore"(?!)
 
Are you with me here: an entire LIFETIME changed because of a misunderstanding; because "we don't do that anymore" which no one bothered to tell me, ahead of time, was the case in the Pierce lab(!)


So, what did this semi-cum laude graduate of the University of Michigan wind up doing in that lab that summer? 

Just this: killing mice, by breaking their necks, then cutting off their tails, holding the "body end" of the tail in one hand, a pair of pliers in the other, grabbing the distal end of the tail with the pliers, then pulling out strands of pure collagen from the interior of the tail, so the guys in the lab down the hall could analyze it and compare it with basement membrane. That's it.

Oh, Barry did "throw me a bone" now and then -- once, by letting me chop up a cancer he had come across and implant bits of it in some mice spleens, to see if they would grow there (some actually did). 

And I got to use his ultracentrifuge once or twice, to spin down some RNA, to see if it would have any effect on the resulting tumors (it didn't). But that was essentially it for the summer.

In the Fall, I started Michigan Medical School and, as I had been forewarned, it turned out to be one of the worst educational experiences a human being could go through.

Luckily for the Medical School, most of the class had their eyes so firmly planted on the MONEY doctors made/make that the LAST thing they would be doing was complaining about the curriculum. 

"Oh no," their attitude was, "just let me suffer through this crap, so I can come out the other end a rich man!"

To humor me, I guess, the school stuck me in the Honors program, but that was little more than a "frying-pan-to-fire" arabesque.

In the end (i.e., after two years), I simply left the school, after starting to ask the "wrong questions:" 

1) "Excuse me, professors, is there anything we can actually CURE?!" "Uh, nothing that comes to mind." 
2) "Well, since we can't 'cure' anything, what about -- oh, I don't know -- PREVENTING disease! How does THAT grab you?"

"'Prevent disease'?! Are you crazy?! You want to put us out of business?! Get out of here!"

So, I did.

Moved to the West Coast and eventually began doing what I had wanted to do via Medical School: prevent disease, with my books "Walk Yourself Thin" and "Dying for a Smoke."

Anyway, that's my (Barry Pierce) story and I'm "sticking to it!"

Glad I had the chance to share it with those who knew the man.