Hey, Brian Morris, is that you?
I only post this because I’m about to head off to the airport to fly to England, where I’ll be talking in part about American creationism. It’s always useful to look at the British tabloids to help realize that the USA doesn’t have a monopoly on idiots.
Behave yourselves while I’m trapped in a flying tin can!
The big news: Skepticon is now officially and formally a 501c3 organization, which means that donors can write off the money you give to them as a tax exemption.
As good scientists and skeptics, though, I wouldn’t expect you to simply take that on their word. You should do the experiment. Send them a big chunk o’ cash, and then deduct it on your 2014 taxes. Get confirmation from the IRS.
I’m going to think less of you if you don’t do the experiment now, since I spelled out the protocol so clearly.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
Here, have a nice comic that explains the situation in Lake Erie.
When I was a kid, Lake Erie was a joke: it was a polluted cesspool with rivers that caught on fire. Places like Erie and Love Canal were the punchlines of a national sense of disgust with abuse of the environment, and amazingly, people got together and changed things: new tighter regulations, clean up of the worst cases (well, that was begun but never finished), and in general, we saw a reduction in pollution around the country.
Then…fucking Ronald fucking Reagan fucking fucked everything up. Trees cause pollution. Regulation is bad for the economy. And every Republican since has followed the same script, right up to “drill baby drill”. Even the Democrats are getting in the act.
And the end result is that everything is turning to shit again.
He has now made several posts expressing his indignation that the media misquotes him. He really wants you to know that he never said aliens are going to hell.
Then Gray stated, “When Maher brought up the post . . . ” But Maher didn’t actually bring up the post. He regurgitated untruths that others were saying about my post. Maher said the following on his TV program:
Creationist Ken Ham who runs the Creation Museum . . . said this week that we should call off the search for extraterrestrial life because aliens haven’t heard the word of Jesus and thus are going to hell anyway.
So, Ms. Gray—where did I make that claim in my post? Check it out here.
Now, Gray does link to the video interview I did on Ray Comfort’s online program, where I made it very clear I did not say aliens “are going to hell anyway.”
But Gray of Salon.com didn’t want the truth get in the way of a good story in order to mock us!
It’s true, he didn’t say they were going to hell. He said that his magic book assured him that the creator of the universe only cares about one planet, Earth, and one very special species, us, and that Jesus’s agonizing death created blood magic that only helps human beings, so clearly there are simply not any aliens anywhere else in the universe.
The dang lamestream media needs to focus on that, his true message, which is of course not at all mockable.
Yes! New blogs on FtB! You must visit them NOOOOOW.
We now have in the line up two ex-Muslims and a roller derby girl (although all three are much more than that):
Heinous Dealings by Heina Dadabhoy
Consider the Tea Cosy by Aoife O’Riordan
Between a Veil and a Dark Place by Hiba Krisht
Are you reading them yet? Stop reading this. Go read them.
You’re way ahead of me — you don’t even have that word in your vocabulary any more.
Brian Dunning of Skeptoid & Shermer’s stable of skeptics has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for fraud. It seems like a light sentence for skimming off a million dollars or so.
That wasn’t surprising. I guess this isn’t surprising, either. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the replacement fourth horse-person of atheism, gave an interview in which she revealed her lack of humanist ideals.
Who do you admire?
"I admire my husband, of course. In terms of political leadership, I admire Henry Kissinger, and this is relevant now because I ask myself, what if we had Kissinger as the secretary of state today instead of John Kerry, what would all this look like, what would he do? I think he would advise on a more comprehensive level. He has a very interesting and incisive view of what American power is, and what it can achieve if implemented well.
"On an intellectual level I admire professor Bernard Lewis. I really admire Benjamin Netanyahu."
Why?
"Because he is under so much pressure, from so many sources, and yet he does what is best for the people of Israel, he does his duty. I really think he should get the Nobel Peace Prize. In a fair world he would get it."
Well, I guess if Kissinger can get a Nobel prize for this:
I guess it’s intellectually consistent to also believe that Netanyahu deserves one for this:
You’ll have to excuse me, though, if I scratch both mass murderers, as well as the person who admires them, from my list of admirable people.
Tom Levenson responds to yet another gun ‘accident’, in which a pregnant woman was shot in the head by a friend showing off a gun. I think this is a very good take on the issue; no responsible gun owner (and they all are, right?) could possibly disagree with this:
Responsible means that whatever happens with your gun is your fault. Period. You accidentally discharge it and no-one gets hurt? How’s this: big fine, confiscate the weapon involved, lose the right to bear arms for a year for the first incident, forever if you repeat. Someone gets hurt or dies? Jail. Civil liability. Loss of gun rights for life. That’s responsibility.
But of course, I dream. That’s not how we roll. Instead, we’ll just water the tree of liberty with a newlywed, and celebrate life by burying her fetus — and wait (not long) for the next red harvest.
Being responsible should actually mean something — it’s not just a word you use to escape the consequences of your actions. But that’s how the gun fondlers all seem to use it — they will flaunt their assault rifles, take great risks with their lives and the lives of others, and hide under the NRA-approved label of “responsible gun-owner”.
Real responsible gun owners know that they are deadly tools and would keep them locked up and treat them like they would a stick of dynamite — extreme hazards that warrant extreme precautions.
I have never seen a paddlefish in the wild, although I’ve seen young adults and embryos in the lab — they are quiet, secretive beasts, cruising gape-jawed through our regional rivers to dine on plankton, and growing to immense size without ever troubling anyone. They are gloriously weird animals. But they are in danger of extinction because they also produce voluminous quantities of eggs, also known as caviar. A large female can carry $40,000 worth of eggs, so they are fished up, ignominiously slit open and disemboweled, and left to rot on the river bank.
It’s a real shame. Once again, we hunt a spectacular North American native species to extinction, all because of greed.
I hope this excellent profile of Dr. Willie Parker doesn’t make him a target, but that’s the sad state of American life right now. He’s a good man doing good work, and he also happens to be a Christian…but don’t hold that against him.
After medical school, he bought a big house and a nice car and overstuffed his refrigerator the way people from poverty do, but those satisfactions soon seemed empty. He dated but never quite settled down. Inspired by Gandhi’s idea that the Gospel should appear to a hungry man in the form of bread, he went to work in a food pantry. But gradually, the steady stream of women with reproductive issues in his practice focused his mind. He thought about his mother and sisters and the grandmother who died in childbirth and began to read widely in the literature of civil rights and feminism. Eventually he came across the concept of "reproductive justice," developed by black feminists who argued that the best way to raise women out of poverty is to give them control of their reproductive decisions. Finally, he had his "come to Jesus" moment and the bell rang. This would be his civil-rights struggle. He would serve women in their darkest moment of need. "The protesters say they’re opposed to abortion because they’re Christian," Parker says. "It’s hard for them to accept that I do abortions because I’m a Christian." He gave up obstetrics to become a full-time abortionist on the day, five years ago, that George Tiller was murdered in church.
He also has a rational perspective on development, in which it’s the woman who is the important one.
Growing reflective, he continues to study the parts. "The reality is we’ve disrupted a life process. There are recognizable fetal parts, right? The capacity for this development is always there. After five weeks, you just have the sac. At six weeks, you have a fetal pole with cardiac activity. At seven to eight weeks, it’s just a larger fetal pole. By nine, it’s differentiated."
But here’s the vital question: Is it a person? Not by the standards of the law, he says. Is it viable outside the womb? It is not. So this piece of life—and remember, sperm is alive, eggs are alive, it’s all life—is still totally dependent on a woman. And that dependence puts it in the domain of her choice. "That’s what I embrace," he says.
But it’s hard not to look at those tiny fingers, no bigger than the tip of a toothpick.
Does that ever disturb him?
"When I recognize whole fetal parts? No. Because I’m not deluded about what this whole process is."
It’s a long article. You should read the whole thing, though.
