Someone has opened the “valve on the tube” that contains comment spam and I’ve been dumping the “chamber pot” I added to contain it several times today, as well as dumping the overflow that the filters missed. It is annoying, but I have no intention of paying to store this garbage on my host.

Natasha at Pacific Views received a slightly higher form of spam on her post, How To Make Good Policy, which features one of “probably paid” watchers of the telcos who leap to suppress the concept of net neutrality by having people read “an important piece on Net Neutrality” by Discovery Institute fellow Bret Swanson. It must be important because that phrase, actually identical articles, appear at dozens of “blogs” in Google.

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The BBC, as well as the rest of the media, is reporting: Jesus tomb found, says film-maker; let the bad reporting begin.

First there weren’t coffins in the cave there were ossuaries. In the “old days” you didn’t stay in the ground after being buried. After the worms and microbes had done their thing, the bones were disinterred so the grave could be reused. The bones were put in boxes, ossuaries, for storage elsewhere. The Catacombs under Rome are bone storage areas.

The Israelis have strict laws regarding human remains, so the bones that were in the boxes that were discovered in the cave were given a proper “burial,” and are not available for testing. The most available for any tests would be fragments.

Any who as read Pharyngula more than a couple of times should know that P.Z Myers is an atheist and rather hard-core, but he is a biologist and is extremely skeptical of claims made about DNA tests from the ossuaries. If you were able to conduct tests, the most you could show would be that the people were relatives and Middle Eastern.

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