Our own Jonas Brothers?

There’s a funny Cat and Girl comic that makes fun of our success as atheists, saying that we’ve gone mainstream. Read it, I got a chuckle…but one of the panels listing factors in our loss of indie cred says, “We have our own Jonas Brothers.” Now I’m stuck. I can’t figure out who our equivalent would be.

In case you don’t know, the Jonas Brothers are a band that plays a kind of Christian pop — they’re on the Disney Channel and appeal to prepubescent girls like David Cassidy did to my generation, only they are even more wholesome and extremely overt in their religiosity.

I’m pondering this, and can’t even imagine a proudly atheist band that plays bubblegum for kiddies, or has a show that sucks in adolescent eyeballs quite like the Jonas Brothers do. Maybe the cartoon is wrong. Maybe we aren’t quite that mainstream yet. Or maybe I’m just so out of it I’ve missed the latest godless sensation.

The mess at Interior

One of the peculiarities of our media right now is that, as everyone knows, the best political reporting is being done by a couple of comedy shows on cable. Another source that has been surprising me is Rolling Stone, which has unshackled a couple of wild men, Tim Dickinson and Matt Taibbi, to go after the corruption and insanity of American politics — one of those things we once upon a time expected our newspaper journalists to do. I guess the powers-that-be think it’s safe to let the drug-addled hippies and punks (and college professors) who read Rolling Stone to know about the failures of our government, but the bourgeoisie must not be perturbed.

If you care about the environment, you must read Dickinson’s Obama’s Sheriff. It’s nominally about our new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, but without saying much about him, it instead dives into the seedy, greedy world of the Interior Department of the past 8 years. Under Bush, we basically gave away our natural resources to anyone willing to chew them up and turn them into a pile of poisonous rubble and decaying trash.

Here’s a sample.

LESS WILDLIFE Julie MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior, routinely overruled the department’s biologists, limiting the amount of “critical habitat” protected from drilling and other development. Federal judges overturned several of her decisions as “arbitrary and capricious,” and among federal scientists her name became synonymous with political interference. “It became a verb for us: getting MacDonalded,” said one staffer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When the inspector general reviewed 20 listings for endangered species in which MacDonald played a role, he found that she had “potentially jeopardized” 13 of them — a track record that “cast doubt on nearly every [endangered species] decision issued during her tenure.” Her decisions frequently benefited private interests, including her own: Her ruling that the Sacramento splittail fish is not an endangered species protected her family farm in California — an operation that clears as much as $1 million a year.

DECAYING PARKS By the time Bush left office, the National Park Service was stuck with a backlog of up to $14 billion in deferred maintenance. The marquee attraction at Dinosaur National Monument — a rock face of exposed Jurassic fossils — remains off-limits because the visitor center is unsafe, and inadequate storage facilities threaten to damage artifacts from the Battle of Little Big Horn. Because of the lack of funds, the government was unable to buy land surrounding Valley Forge and Zion National Park, putting the property at risk for “detrimental development.” Worst of all, the administration’s failure to create a grazing plan at Yellowstone Park to accommodate the plains buffalo — the animal that graces the Interior Department’s seal — contributed to the deaths of more than 1,100 bison last year. It was the greatest buffalo slaughter since the species was driven to near extinction by hunters in the late 1800s.

Keep in mind that this is only a taste — it goes on for page after depressing page. We’ve been robbed.

And what about Salazar? He gets a couple of paragraphs at the end, giving him props for being willing to go in and shake up the tradition of corruption…but also points out that he’s from the conservative rancher tradition, and is going to continue the policies of free give-aways of our resources. So, I guess we can expect less snow-bunny sex with mining representatives and less cocaine-snorting ministers, but the destruction will continue.

YouTube has banned the James Randi Educational Foundation!?!?

This is insane: YouTube has become an overzealous nanny, protecting kooks from offense, now banning the eminently respectable JREF.

There’s only one way to respond to this, in addition to writing letters of protest: I’m going to have to stop using YouTube at all. I’ll be posting no more YouTube videos until the JREF is fully reinstated, and even then I’ll be looking for alternatives (XTube? RedTube? No, I know…GodTube! (seriously, don’t go to any of those, they’re awful)). YouTube is ubiquitous, but it’s a common technology, there are lots of sites that can implement it, and there’s no need to tie ourselves to the one host that seems to be run by nervous nellies with brain rot.

Battlestar Galactica open thread

I’ve received a few queries about the end of the Battlestar Galactica series, and I can’t offer an opinion — I didn’t watch it. Since there seems to be enough fans here, though, I’ll turn you loose on it. Great? Sucked? Eh?

I didn’t watch it because I haven’t watched much of the series at all. There are a couple of reasons: 1) I’m old enough to remember the original BSG, and was not at all interested (I know, it’s radically different, but I didn’t know that at the beginning); 2) it’s on the Sci-Fi Channel, which has become the label of instant recognition for cheesy formulaic crap; 3) I did see a few episodes early in the run, and was turned off by the god-happy nonsense in those few shows — again, I heard that they went off in some interesting directions after that, but the damage was done to my impression, and 4) it’s the kind of series that demands long investment in the full story, and I’ve never had the time to catch up with it all. I may grab the DVD of the whole series at some point, just to give it the attention so many people tell me it deserves.

High praise for British journalism

This is an amusing tale of creationist hypocrisy. Ken Ham is complaining that one of his staff members was “ambushed”, because he wasn’t given a solo interview, but had to share the discussion with a critic (meanwhile, Ham has no compunction about “ambushing”, in the same sense, scientific discussions). What I found most interesting, though, were Ken Ham’s complaints about the BBC.

This past week, Dr. Jason Lisle–our astrophysicist*—was invited to be on a BBC radio program out of Southampton , England (where I spoke a couple of weeks ago). We were told that it was just going to be an “examination of creationism.” Well, we are somewhat leery when it comes to dealing with the British media–by far, British journalists and commentators (and particularly those from the BBC) are the most mocking about biblical Christianity of all the media we’ve worked with over the years. We have had probably 20 different countries send reporters to the Creation Museum since we opened 22 months ago, and most of them have been fair and balanced in their coverage–but not so with the typical British reporter.

Take a bow, any typical British reporters reading this. Could you please come over here and give lessons to typical American reporters?

*You have to giggle at the idea of an astrophysicist who claims that the universe is only 6000 years old.

New Scientist flips the bird at scientists, again

We’ve been through this before. When New Scientist ran their misleading “Darwin was wrong” cover, we hammered at them and pointed out that they were doing us no favors — they were giving ammunition to creationists who would never read the contents, but would wave that cover at school board meetings. And they did. We chastised the editor, Roger Highfield, and we had the impression that he was penitent, but it turns out we were completely wrong.

New Scientist is now using that same cover again in their promotional material to flog magazines. Yes, that is their business, to sell magazines…but this represents a declaration that they think their market is the ignorant creationist segment of wanna-be pretend scientists. That’s a real shame.

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Jerry Coyne calls for a boycott. I have to agree. If they don’t want fans of real science to read their magazine, then we won’t. I also won’t hesitate to tell young people interested in science that they shouldn’t waste their time with New Scientist — pick up Seed instead, or even Discover, if you’re a bit déclassé. But sorry, NS is joining the Weekly World News as yet another rag pandering to the gullible.

Come on, New Scientist

This is ridiculous. New Scientist abruptly yanked an article from their web site because they “received a complaint about the contents of the story.” Hmmm. Makes a fellow really want to see what horror was wreaked in the censored item: Pornography? Personal defamation? Embarrassing revelation? Alas, it’s nothing quite so juicy. You can find a copy of the pulled article (isn’t it sweet how the web makes it almost impossible to actually make history disappear?): it’s all about how to spot a religious agenda in so-called science books that the creationists like to peddle — basic stuff like code words, such as “Darwinist” or “materialism”, or the usual spacey interpretations of quantum physics, or the habit of believing that an argument from consequences has any relevance to the truth of a matter.

It mentions some specific examples, such as James Le Fanu, Denyse O’Leary, and Expelled, but these are all perfectly good and accurate instances of religiously-motivated products. Did one of them complain?

I am troubled by the apparent knee-jerk retraction of a legitimate article that is critical of creationism simply because there was a “complaint” (I’d also be concerned if a creationist article was yanked with such ease—more speech, not less speech, is the answer to the idiocy of these yahoos). I hope New Scientist isn’t going to be catering to the whims of popular, uninformed nervous nellies. That kind of timidity is not appropriate to a journal that has “Scientist” in its title.

Watchmen

We made the 45 mile drive to distant Alexandria to see Watchmen this afternoon. On the way there, I learned that neither Skatje nor Collin had ever even tried to read the graphic novel, so I almost slammed on the brakes and turned around to make them sit down and read it before I’d take them — but my own fanboi nature prevented me from putting off the movie any longer, so I took them anyway. The kids have been sternly instructed now that we’re home that they’re required to read it. Good thing I kept going, too — it was excellent. Where Ironman was last summer’s exhilarating carnival ride of a superhero movie, this one is the grim and intellectual anti-superhero movie of this year. Ten tentacles up!

It is true that the movie did remove the giant space squid from the ending, but — and this is rather heretical for me to say — this ending was better, and made the story even stronger. I was imp…

Wait, what’s that noise?

There’s mad-eyed bearded man pounding on my window! It’s…it’s…Alan Moore! How did he know what I was writing? I haven’t even posted it yet!

He’s broken in! He’s com…NOOOOOOOOOOO! <SQEEEEEEE> -fzzztzzzt- <crackle> *click*

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