The Kiss

It’s embarrassing enough that all the Minnesota blogs are snorting in disgust at Michele Bachmann’s kiss, but now those foreign, non-Minnesotan sites are making a big foofaraw, too.

Yes, we confess: Minnesota’s sixth district elected a dumb-as-rocks, simpering, fundagelical Bush sycophant to congress, one who would enthusiastically slobber all over the president on national television.

However, in our favor, we did not re-elect Mark Kennedy to the senate. He was such an outrageous bootlicking Bush toady, we might have witnessed some hot and explicit flunky-on-prez action instead…consider yourself lucky.

Put down those non sequiturs and stereotypes, Captain Fishsticks, and no one will get hurt

Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he’s a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he’s written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole ‘nother column of the times table drops out of his brain, objects to this threat. He starts off by agreeing with Pitman’s argument, but does so by tying it to some of his lunatic obsessions—he’s a pro-smoking anti-vaccination guy.

I’ve made much the same argument relative to policymakers who unscientifically exaggerate the dangers of secondhand smoke and bureaucrats who ignore scientific evidence about the dangers of universal vaccination.

This approval will not last. The rest of his column is a weird paean to excusing ignorance of science. You see, if people learn more math and physics, they’ll get the idea that we live in a “clockwork universe”, and then they won’t like music or poetry anymore. Seriously.

[Read more…]

Minnesota creationist update

I am such a trendsetter. First I pick up on the Paszkiewicz story weeks before the NY Times, and now another creationist I took a shot at, Julie Haberle, is written up in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Ms Haberle is responsible for a set of anti-evolution billboards going up in the region, and she does not come off very well. Here are a few quotes from her that expose her shortcomings.

Julie Haberle, 55, said she once believed creationism “was absolutely nuts” and has over the past nine years come to the contradictory conclusion that “evolution is just silly.”

“I’m just a hack.”

“I’m not a biblical scholar and don’t pretend to have one original thought on the site.”

Contradictory hack without a single original thought? Couldn’t have said it better myself. Oh, and speaking of me, I’m quoted, too—and look, Ma, I’m famous!

“It’s kind of standard creationism stuff,” said Paul Z. Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris and one of the nation’s most ardent critics of intelligent design. “It’s not a serious site — it’s just chunks of arguments strung together.”

Before I get too cocky, though, the article also notes that the billboards are cheap: somewhere shy of $10,000 each. That’s cheap? I think each one greatly exceeds the entire yearly budget of MnCSE.

Greg Laden, another ardent critic of ID and UM professor who was quoted, has also commented on this article.

School’s out!

Time to go get a beer at Drinking Liberally, ’cause the Fall semester of 2006 is all over but for the final exams and the grading and the tears. The last of the written work was turned in today, and now it’s just grading until my eyeballs evulse.

Here is a prime bit of end of term suckage, too: it is mid-December in Minnesota, and it is raining. Raining! If I wanted to live in a place with cool wet winters, I’d move back to Seattle.

Socializing them right into the hate camp

Ah, the pleasures of living in a small town in Red America: the high schools are fertile fields for fostering hate, and now it’s facilitated by technology, like Facebook, that allows them to sow it far and wide. My daughter is on a rampage right now, upset because her erstwhile peers at the high school have been putting their bigotry proudly on display. There is currently some ferocious babble going on in a Morris Area High School facebook site, and here’s one of the more outrageous comments:

Okay this is really random but it has to deal with the comment about homosexuality issue that Sibley brought up. Honestly why must our country keep discussing this issue. We all know it’s wrong and that it just shouldn’t be that way. If you want to go with the same sex move somewhere else. Please before we ship yah off. Honestly just get rid of them and then we won’t have this issue. Just ship them to Canada. But yah homosexuality is just wrong so just say no and get over it. It’s never gonna be right so yah!!

There’s more there—way too much more—and there are lots of kids who are blindly supporting that kind of statement. They say “it’s wrong” and that’s enough: their brains shut down, they’ve got nothing to back it up, and they just repeat the “just wrong” mantra over and over again, spicing it up with eliminationist calls to get rid of them. “So yah!!” sums up their reasoning perfectly.

Where do these kids pick up this kind of bigotry? From their parents and churches, of course, but also, the schools out here have been collaborators in a conspiracy of silence. A year ago last Spring, we had a perfect example: the university put on a play about tolerance and diversity, and regional schools boycotted the event, and the reaction to the Vagina Monologues has been similarly backwards. There are no processes in place to teach kids something more than their tradition-based dogmatic ignorance: the schools have given up, some of the churches encourage it, and whole families wallow in this level of stupidity.

And the kid who says we should ship all the gays to Canada? He’s student body president at the high school. He’s a member of the popular clique.

Minnesota on our minds

Hmmm…there are a couple of regional links that have popped up recently.

Just what we needed…

Hey, Minnesotans—anyone want to tune in to KKMS Christian radio right now? I’m about to be tied up in class stuff for a while, so I’ll say more later—it seems we have a new creationist group mobilizing in the state.

I caught a few bits of the radio show (that hurt—it’s a fundagelical radio station), and I’ve also heard from a few readers. There is apparently a billboard in a very prominent place at 12th and Washington along 35W, the freeway that cuts through the center of Minneapolis. This, apparently, is the whole raison d’etre for the organization, to throw up billboards. The founder of the group, Julie Haberle, says God talked to her and told her she needs to do billboards to refute evolution. These billboards just direct people to her website, which she explains she built by taking snippets from Ken Ham and others and putting them together—it shows. There’s nothing there but the tired old creationist nonsense we’ve seen so often.

There is quote mining, lots and lots of quote mining. There are also flatly wrong assertions from “five time Nobel nominee” Henry “Fritz” Schaeffer, Behe, Phillip Johnson, and other DI figureheads. The creationist crap is straight from the bunghole of Answers in Genesis, and it’s all garbage.

One other curious thing about the website is that every page has a nautilus shell logo on it…which reminded me of a certain other site. I suspect there is some aping of the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education going on, although of course they are doing so poorly.

The question I have about all this is where the money is coming from—billboards aren’t cheap, especially in such prime locations. She didn’t say. She said they were an official non-profit, they received donations, and that the billboard companies had given them a very good deal, and she specifically mentioned Clear Channel as being very helpful, and that their media exposure is completely free. She also said she hopes to build this little anti-evolution organization up, and then pass it on to someone like D. James Kennedy or James Dobson.

Most of her radio conversation was rampant idiocy. Would you believe Answers in Genesis is very technical, so she had to dumb down their material for the website? That there are no “transitory fossils”? That because we haven’t grown wings, evolution didn’t happen? Hey, if that doesn’t persuade you, why are fish still trying to get out of the water? And why are there still monkeys?

Really. She said that. I had no idea fish were trying to get out of the water.

One reader wrote in to tell me that this woman is “scary stupid”. I have to agree.

One measure of the dishonest depths to which creationists will sink is their willingness to put words in the mouths of dead men. Haberle claimed that Carl Sagan knew the “mathematical statistics” were against life appearing on earth and that’s why he was looking for life on other planets—because he was sure that’s where we had to come from, since it was impossible for us to have evolved.

She lied.

Why don’t we ask Carl to tell us what he thinks? It’ll help wash away the unsavory taste of those freakish cretins, too.

You can see my house from here!

Amanda has an interesting article on cities trying to maintain and attract their educated class—and it includes a nice map of the frequency of college graduates by US counties. I just had to point out that it’s easy to spot Stevens County, where I live—it’s the orange square in a sea of paleness.

i-eb03fb726fd7c675eb16771bffdf49cc-uscg.jpg

It’s too bad the huge counties out west make the western part of the country look misleadingly coarse-grained, but still, you can spot the places that attract the highly educated. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s quite as easy as plopping a university down somewhere to turn it into a magnet for bohemians.