In case you haven’t heard of him (good for you!), he was an academic who promoted racism.

In 2002, Rushton became president of the Pioneer Fund, which has for decades funded dubious studies linking race to characteristics like criminality, sexuality and intelligence. Pioneer has long promoted eugenics, or the “science” of creating “better” humans through selective breeding. Set up in 1937 and headed by Nazi sympathizers, the group strove to “improve the character of the American people” through eugenics and procreation by people of white colonial stock. Pioneer has financed a number of leading race scientists, lavishing large sums each year on those who work to “prove” inherent racial differences that the vast majority of scientists regard as nonsense.

He has died of cancer on Tuesday. That’s a rough way to go, and I’m sorry for that — but I regret even more that he wasted most of his life poisoning the discourse with evil racist nonsense.

Check out the website! Sign the petitions! Read Maggie Koerth-Baker’s summary! Exploration Day is the cool idea to rename Columbus Day, to strip out the ugly historical implications — we celebrate the genocide of the first inhabitants of the American continents? — and build up new and positive associations. I’m all for it. Now we just need to get people with some clout behind it.

It’s going to get interesting this weekend: we will have Brownian, Louis, Jen McCreight, and Rebecca Watson on a Google+ hangout on Sunday, 5pm Central time, to talk about the limitations of the current skepticism and atheism movements, and how Third Wave Atheism/Atheism+/Sniny New Atheism should and can extend our reach.

A lot of people have been writing me asking to join in, but notice that Google+ has a ten person limit to hangouts, and I’ve already booked five of us. I’ll be sending out invitations to the primary guests first, and I’m going to let them talk for a while before maybe sending out a broader wave of invitations for the limited spaces left. I may also ask the late-comers to limit themselves to a short comment or question and then step out to let others in.

You will be able to watch and listen live on Google+ and youtube, and I’ll keep my eye on the comments for good questions to pass along to our panel. I’m afraid this one might get swamped with people clamoring to join in; don’t be offended if you’re not allowed in, I will try to pay attention to comments during the discussion!

Gay marriage is a useful marker. It’s an issue that’s rather orthogonal to atheism, but we can still use it as a parameter to help us identify our allies (it is not, of course, a perfect or even entirely sufficient marker, but it’s still kind of cool to see how it splits the country into the the America I want to live in and the America I hope to see in the dustbin of history). Here’s a poll on legalizing gay marriage that breaks respondents down into various categories.

The proponents of Bad America: the Tea Party and religious-values Republicans.

The vanguard of Good America: Urban liberals and the agnostic left.

Maybe I should flip my metrics around. The real marker for regressive, bad ol’ Americans is their conflation of God and country.

Ginger, 42, and a resident of Northwest Louisiana has just delivered a healthy baby girl. I’m impressed with Ginger, who has done all the hard work of pregnancy multiple times and still seems to strongly bond with her babies.

It was the fifth baby for Ginger, who lives in the same social group as Tracy and Valentina Rose, two chimpanzee youngsters at Chimp Haven who were born unexpectedly.

But — forgive me for this, I’m a guy — I’m even more impressed with the father, Conan.

DNA testing pointed to Conan as their father; he was immediately re-vasectomized.

Conan, who seems to be getting the reputation of being somewhat of a player, has now been vasectomized three times and all the females at Chimp Haven have been placed on birth control pills.

Conan is one potent fellow.

It’s been a long day, and a rough long evening of travel. I got into Minneapolis at midnight, and I’m so tired I’ve just checked into a cheap motel to get some sleep.

So why am I lying here clinging to my iPad watching NASA TV? I’m probably going to pass out soon with my arms wrapped around it.

Go, Mars Curiosity, go!

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Yay! Landing successful! That means I can fall asleep now.

Alexander Aan has been thrown into prison for blasphemy, but he still has some contact with the world. He has sent a message out:

You can write back. The Atheist Alliance will forward email to him, and a little correspondence might let him know the world is watching. Also, someone imprisoned for blasphemy is probably the safest guy in the penal system to talk to, right?

And you can read it online, as well as at all of their conferences.

I guess we’re winning, aren’t we? Progress is being made on every front.

They’re doing a live thingie on The Non-Prophets youtube channel and Google+. You can tune in, it’s mostly safe.