Today is Shawn Otto day at UMM

We’re having a visit today from Shawn Lawrence Otto, a fellow who has been fighting against the un-American war on science on the web and in a book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. He’s speaking on campus tonight at 7:30 Central, in the HFA Recital Hall — I urge local community members to show up, he has important things to say about education and climate change — and that talk is going to be streamed live, so all you distant strangers can also watch the show.

It was a little strange, though, to get messages from the university administration telling me I’m expected to go to dinner with him. It turns out, I’m in his book — there’s actually a substantial 4 or 5 page section in there where he discusses an interview he had with me (I’m getting old, and I’ve done so many interviews that they all bleed together), so I had to run out and get a copy of the book to find out what I was getting into. It all sounded a bit Chris Mooney-like.

Fortunately, the book is good — if the topic is a bit Mooneyish, it’s the Mooney of The Republican War on Science, and not the batty, Nisbet-bespelled Mooney of Unscientific America, and his stuff on me isn’t a hatchet job. Otto doesn’t come out and declare me the absolutely correct master of all I pontificate on (I’ll have to bend his ear and make suggestions for the second edition), but at least he recognizes that there are many different angles to take in fighting ignorance. You are allowed to read the book and listen to the talk without feeling outraged.

(Also on Sb)

#OCCUPYMORRIS

I never thought it would happen, but the flaming radicals here in rural Minnesota are actually rising up to overthrow the system. Tonight, 1 November, at 6pm, the 99% (which should be about 4,950 people, given the population of our town) are meeting on the campus mall to MARCH ON MORRIS. Which means about a ten-minute walk.

I’ll be there. Everyone should show up. All you townies and students, country farmers, vagrants passing through, faculty and staff, hardworking blue-collar wage slaves, come on out tonight!

I’m hoping this will be the seminal event that crystallizes the whole movement and shatters the dominant paradigm. It could happen. You don’t want to miss it, do you?

Petty internet blackmail

I have to mention two strange examples of internet thuggery.

I hosted a Thunderf00t video the other day in which he outed his own identity, in response to attempts by a youtuber named DawahFilms to extort him with threats of revealing him. It was a nice way to short circuit a threat. I keep hearing from people complaining, though, that Thunderf00t is the bad guy here, which I find completely baffling. Notice: he revealed his own name, not something about DawahFilms.

I have now received email from DawahFilms arguing his case. He’s not very good at this, because it contained this argument:

I am neither a person who threatens death on people for their “free speech” or “criticism” (in fact Ive made videos condemning such behavior) nor am I out to “hurt” Dr. Mason, but instead wished to report him to his university for his unethical behavior and treatment of me.

That looks like a confession to me. I really don’t care if Thunderf00t said rude things about Islam or about defenders of superstition on the internet or youtube; but when people try to threaten their critics’ livelihood, as DawahFilms wants to do, I’m not at all sympathetic. Especially when they’re so weirdly oblivious that they can claim that they don’t want to “hurt” someone, and that they just wish to report him to his employer, all in one sentence.

The second case involves a colleague at UMTC, Bill Gleason, who is getting harrassed by one of the dumbest local ideologues it has ever been my displeasure to encounter online. I’m talking about Thomas Swift, aka TJSwift, AKA Swiftee, a far right, illiterate crank who tainted Pharyngula for a while, until he was banned.

You cannot imagine how stupid TJSwift is. He’s not a master of rhetoric; he struggles with spelling, and punctuation, and grammar, and can barely compose a tweet. So instead, he resorts to scribbling crude cartoons in MS Paint. He also has no artistic ability; these things are the kind of crude caricatures one might find scratched into the walls of a filthy toilet stall in a run-down gas station. To make them mildly recognizable, he pastes in digitized photos of people’s faces. Otherwise, though, they are incoherent, sloppy, pointless scrawls.

I saw some of the examples Gleason posted, and recognized the style immediately. I was getting a collection of these sent to me a year or two ago, emailed under a pseudonym, and containing little more than the kind of pornographic imagery you’d expect of 9 year old, talentless, angry idiot — cartoons of me having sex with a dog (or a cow, or a beige blob…something unrecognizable), for instance.

The real surprise, though, is that this frothing nutcase is allied with some of the most prominent conservative bloggers in Minnesota, Powerline and Mitch Berg. This is how low the Right has sunk.

Oh, look who’s coming to town in April

Eden Prairie, one of the Minneapolis suburbs, is getting a visit from that piglet-lovin’ fella, Ken Ham on 29-30 April, at Grace Church. My calendar is actually free that weekend, so far. I’m tempted to crash the event and witness the lies firsthand, unless something more entertaining comes up, like a prostate exam or a tax audit.

It’s a Greta Christina invasion

Look: Greta is going to be in Minneapolis and St. Cloud this weekend, and she’ll also be on Atheist Talk radio on Sunday morning.

I’m hoping to make it to her Sunday talk, but I have a conflict: on Sunday, 18 September, before her talk, I have to appear on a panel over the internet to speak at the Tech Museum in San Jose, California. Thanks to the wonders of science, I don’t have to be in San Jose…I just have to have a quiet place with a stable internet connection. If I can arrange that, I’ll drive in to the Twin Cities.

The topic of the panel is “Religion and Science: Beliefs and the Brain,” and it’s associated with the opening of an exhibit on Islamic science. I get to be the poopyhead arguing that science and religion are incompatible, in case you couldn’t guess.

The kind of people who elect Michele Bachmann

Scum of the earth. Parts of Michele Bachmann’s district contain the most smug, pious, conservative rat-buggering jerks on the planet (like Marcus Bachmann and his anti-gay “clinic”, for instance). And the symptoms are beginning to show: the Anoka-Hennepin school district, part of Bachmann’s domain, home of the Elmer Gantry-wannabe Bradley Dean, is also the epicenter of an epidemic of teen suicides, 9 in the last two years. These are kids who were bullied for being gay, or suspected of being gay, or not fitting in to the their inbred little community (and who would want to?), and the school district has been acquiescing to pressure from religious groups to maintain a policy of intolerance and even demonization of gays.

As civil rights groups have pushed the Minnesota school district to do more to increase tolerance of LGBT students, conservative religious groups fought to keep them away from public schools. After Samantha’s suicide and several others, students in Anoka-Hennepin schools participated in the Day of Silence. The event, organized by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, encourages kids to remain silent for the day in recognition of the effect of anti-gay bullying and harassment. In response, religious activists took up the “Day of Truth,” an event championed by the “ex-gay ministry” Exodus International that’s usually held the day before the Day of Silence. Students who participated were encouraged to engage their classmates in discussions of homosexuality from a Christian perspective.

Fifteen-year-old Justin Aaberg appears to have been one of the targets of this initiative. One day last year Justin came home and told his mom, Tammy, that another student had told him he would to go to hell because he was gay. “That did something to his brain,” she says. He hanged himself in his bedroom last summer. Only after his suicide did Tammy learn that the Parents Action League had reportedly worked with area churches to hand out T-shirts promoting the “Day of Truth” to students at his high school (which is also Bachmann’s alma mater). The students were also instructed to “preach to the gay kids,” Aaberg says. (No one from the Parents Action League responded to a request for comment.)

You would think that Christians, who claim to have the moral high ground in everything, would recognize that driving kids to suicide is not ethical behavior. Unfortunately not; it’s part of their agenda. If they can’t convert them to their sanctimonious faith, it’s just as good to have them dead.

Will the school district change its policies? I doubt it. The churches dictate what is allowed.

Small town movie theater tech

I was reading Roger Ebert’s lament over the disgraceful decline of quality in theater projection (a function of theater owners who just don’t care anymore and the corrupting influence of bad 3D), and then I remembered that last year I took some pictures of the funky old technology in our local movie house, the Morris Theatre.

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This is a classy old place, a bit run down now, but once it was the entertainment center for the whole community. It was built in the 1940s, and it’s very old school: a single screen, so you don’t get many choices here. What’s playing this week is what’s playing this week. That’s fine, though, since you don’t go just for the movie, but for the atmosphere and to sample the different audiences that show up for different movies.

Anyway, my daughter, Skatje worked there until she graduated from college and abandoned us to move hundreds of miles away and leave us desolated and lonely, and so one evening when I was the only customer in the theater (that sometimes happens, and then I get the whole big screen to myself, which is not economically viable, but that’s a whole different matter), I puttered about getting in the way and seeing what was involved. I took a few pictures. I don’t know if they’ll make sense — the room was awesomely cluttered and complicated.

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Next week in St Paul

I’ll be on Minnesota Public Radio on 31 May, on a program called Bright Ideas, in front of a live studio audience, which will probably pepper me with obnoxious questions. Or fun questions. We’ll find out.

This event may have already been ‘sold’ out (tickets are free) — but you locals can try to get in here (Never mind, it is already sold out).

That’s our Michele!

Michele Bachmann opened her mouth again. She compared increasing the tax rates for the rich to the Holocaust.

She said she was shocked to hear that many Americans weren’t aware that millions of Jews had died until after World War II ended.

Bachmann said the next generation will ask similar questions about what their elders did to prevent them from facing a huge tax burden.

“I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action,” she said, referring to the Holocaust. “But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to.”

Shorter Michele Bachman: “Expecting me to bear a fair share of my civic responsibility is like gassing me to death!”