When I heard that Sean Hannity had jauntily offered to allow himself to be waterboarded, I confess to a moment’s small, viciously gleeful anticipation. However, archy makes a good case for not doing it. After all, if it really is torture, and torture is wrong, and we argue that we shouldn’t even be doing it to putative terrorists…we also shouldn’t be doing it to the small, weak-minded, and stupid.
Those astronomers keep finding new extrasolar planets — 350 of them so far — but none are just right. Two new planets have been discovered that are almost earthlike.
Gliese 581 e is the closest in size to Earth, only 1.9 times larger. Unfortunately, it’s also too close to its star, and is probably way, way too hot.
Gliese 581 d is even larger, but it’s sitting square in the habitable zone, where liquid water would be possible. The gravity would be a killer there, but…hmmm. If it were covered in water, it could be a perfect place for squid — huge colonies of space squid in a vast ocean. And it’s only about 21 light years away, right next door! As long as I’m imagining space squid, I think all I need to do is imagine a faster than light drive, and presto, I’m there!
The physicist Stephen Hawking has been hospitalized, a serious business for a 67 year old man with ALS. We should all hope for the best, but don’t pray — we shall trust in modern medicine and science, and the stamina of a man who has demonstrated remarkable persistence in the face of daunting health problems.
Old timers here may recall the saga of Abunga Books, an online bookstore with the sole distinction of having a feature that allowed customers to ban books from the inventory that they didn’t like…which meant, of course, that evolution and atheism and anything that touched on those two was promptly purged. You can imagine how people here responded to that empowering policy: they scurried right on over to help ban the Bible and C.S. Lewis. The hypocrisy of Abunga was then exposed: they honored requests to ban Phillip Pullman, but banning the Bible was not allowed. So much for the illusion of vox populi.
You will be pleased to learn that now, after about a year, Abunga Books has quietly expired. There will be no funeral. Nobody cared.
It’s a question that makes it hard to suppress a giggle: how many of you are going to be teabagging today?
I think it’s awesome that this last desperate gasp of the far right wing to achieve political relevance got tagged with such an appropriately ridiculous moniker. The demented duo of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have made me laugh for the first and probably only time.
It is getting a little old watching the more culturally conscious members of the media making fun of the clueless wingnuts, though. This is just too easy.
(via Sullivan)
This will put a smile on your face — James Dobson is in despair.
The battles that we fought in the Eighties now, we were victorious in many of those conflicts with the culture, trying to defend righteousness, trying to defend the unborn child, trying to preserve the dignity of the family and the definition of marriage. We fought all those battles and really it was a holding action. […]
[W]e made a lot of progress through the Eighties but then we turned into the Nineties and the internet came along and a new president came along and all of that went away and now we are absolutely awash in evil. And we are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say that we have lost all those battles, but God is in control and we are not going to give up now, right?
Knowing Dobson’s definition of what is ‘evil’, I am overjoyed to be awash in it. Keep on discouraging these sour old dogmatists!
I’m on the Reasonable Doubts podcast this week, if you’d care to tune in. This was recorded when I was in Michigan, near the end of my visit, and you can tell…my voice gets huskier after a couple of days of non-stop talking. Or maybe those rascals snuck in a ringer to dub over me, in order to get something that sounded intelligent.
Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has died.
The CFI World Congress had Michael Ruse speak on science education and religion, which I could have told anyone would be a ghastly mistake. The guy has got some very peculiar notions that, if more widely accepted, would destroy science education in this country. Larry Moran was annoyed to find that scientists aren’t being asked to speak on this issue, while Kristine Harley seems appalled at some of his specific answers.
Then, Michael Ruse drew the analogy that a science teacher who taught evolution without mentioning the Bible or God, but nevertheless caused a conflict within a student who was indoctrinated by creationism, was attacking that student’s beliefs (actually that student’s parents’ beliefs) and therefore violating the Constitution!
Using this argument, Michael Ruse then compared the above science teacher to a teacher who taught the students that “some animals with certain genitals are inferior to other animals with different genitals,” and then claimed, “Oh, I said nothing about men and women! I didn’t teach one was inferior to another!” Now, I ask you, is that analogy apt? Considering I was the only woman who asked a question, and it didn’t get answered?
Well, a man asked him if a teacher taught that the value of pi was 3.14 but a parent believes that it is three (as it is in the Bible), if the teacher was, according to Ruse, violating the Constitution. Ruse said yes! (Then he attempted to spin it and accused Tabash again of being dishonest.)
Then he said, “I agree with Eddie Tabash! I don’t want The Flood taught in schools!” ignoring the obvious fact that, by what he claimed above, any teacher teaching geology would, according to Ruse, be attacking theology, rendering the teaching of geology “unconstitutional” and allowing that parent to block the subject or remove the child.
See what I mean? If we interpreted Constitutional restriction on the endorsement of religion in the classroom to mean that we could never teach anything that contradicts a religion somewhere, we could teach nothing at all.
Sad news: I was not able to make it to Miller’s talk at St. Catherine’s last night. We’re down to one car right now, and the choice was between me indulging myself with a long drive and a Ken Miller talk at the end of it, or my wife could have the vehicle so she could do the responsible thing and go to work. She won.
However, I have received some email about it (maybe I’ll get permission to post some of it), and there is one account on the web. It sounds like it was about what I expected: almost entirely good stuff, with a few wacky bits around the edges about his weird cult’s beliefs. He did have the advantage of one creationist in the Q&A throwing him one of their softball questions…usually, the creationists don’t bother to come in the door at my talks, so I’m a little jealous.
If anyone else managed to make it, tell us about it.
