Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Happy spider!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
What happened last night? Did someone spike the entire North American water supply with hallucinogens? Because for some reason all the kooks went nuts in a short span of time. Many of you probably noticed that David Mabus/Markuze, the Canadian lunatic with the obsession with Nostradamus and James Randi and seeing atheists burn in hell, went on a spamming spree all over here (a spree which seems to have been mostly cleaned up now). He was also emailing me his angry rants, so that was another mess to clean up.
There was other silly email, but I’ve thrown most of it out, too. You might be amused at the Return of the Kwok, though. He’s been mailing me regularly, and also cc’ing his cockeyed screeds to random other people, like senior faculty in my discipline. This one also went out to Abbie, for no rational reason that I can determine.
There’s a new entry in the Urban Dictionary: pz envy.
The jealousy expressed by an atheist who’s not quite as famous, popular, or controversial as PZ Myers. ”
Unknown Atheist Blogger felt some serious pz envy when she realized she didn’t have enough followers to crash a poll.”
Bob: Man, I only got one piece of hate mail last month, but Pharyngula mocked 42 letters this past week!
Jane: Oh, enough of your pz envy!
Clearly, I’m going to have to run out and trademark my name before it becomes commodified by its ubiquitous usage in other contexts.
It’s a grim subject this week: Atheists Talk radio will be discussing assisted suicide at 9am Sunday morning.
Uh-oh. There is evidence that the damning email might have been faked. The “from” field of the message looks to have been crudely pasted in, and this whole story may be a product of a slighted student’s imagination.
This is an astonishing example of homophobic bigotry in a nursing college. A student was basically flunked out of a key course in the curriculum for a reason you will find hard to believe — here’s a letter from a nursing faculty member to the student:
Nioska, I’ve been thinking about the meeting in rita’s office and I feel that maybe Nursing is the wrong career for you. As a nurse, I have to advocate for my patients, and i feel that female patients will be uncomfortable having a lesbian nurse caring for them. You do not provide a sense of security to patients when you keep important information from them. Your sexual orientation is something important that patients have a right to know so that they can decide if they wish to have you as their caregiver. I myself am not homophobic at all, but I would not want a lesbian nurse caring for me when I am vulnerable. I would just not feel comfortable with that.
I think it might be best if you see student services to explore other career options that do not involve physical interaction, and intimacy. It wuold look better if you left nursing out of your own accord, rather than get kicked out.
i am just being honest. at the beginning of the rotation you asked me to be honest in my feedback, and i am doing just that.
Tassy
Notice: the student is a lesbian, and she does not trouble her patients with her sexual orientation … and the faculty member is penalizing her for being discreet! She is actually insisting that her students declare their sexuality, a completely irrelevant characteristic, to all of her patients.
If I were in the hospital, and my nurse walked up to my bed and cheerfully announced, “I am a heterosexual!”, I can guarantee you that my wife would march up to the administration and demand an immediate change of the nursing assignment. The sexual preferences of nurses may be a staple of porn films, but it is not the reality of health care.
And look at that classic disclaimer…she’s not homophobic, oh no — she just wouldn’t want a homosexual giving her injections and changing her bedpan.
This is absolutely outrageous. Even worse, the college is dragging out the investigation, has hurt the student’s prospects, and shows no sign of actually wanting to address the issue, preferring to try and place the blame on the student. The college also outed the student to all of her fellow students in the course of ‘investigating’ the problem. I’ve got a full account from the student below the fold.
(via JREF)
First Iowa, and now North Dakota — North Dakota has rejected a bill that would have given “personhood” to every fertilized egg. The senate voted by a large majority, but not unanimity, to squash that very silly bill.
OK, Wisconsin and South Dakota — your turn. Do something to impress me tomorrow.
The Vatican is champing at the bit to turn Pope John Paul II into a saint, and central to their case is the story of Jory Aebly. Aebly was a young man who was mugged, shot in the head, and expected to die…but he recovered, fortunately. What’s the connection to a dead pope? Well, there isn’t much of one. In the hospital, he was given a rosary that had supposedly been blessed by the pope, and his religious family now credits John Paul II for his recovery. Never mind that the pope had been dead for four years.
What also isn’t mentioned is that Aebly’s friend, Jeremy Pechanec, who was also mugged and shot, died of his injuries. Was he an atheist or something? Does the pope’s magic only extend to people who hold this one particular rosary?
Why isn’t this magic rosary being used regularly for all brain injury victims in the hospital right now? Sometimes people can recover from horrific injuries, so one case isn’t at all persuasive…now if the hospital were slapping the super-duper magic beads into every victim’s hands as they were being rushed through the emergency room door, and they were all getting better, then I’d say there is something worth investigating going on.
I also want to know how many other people the hospital chaplain used his ju-ju beads on, and how many of them died. You’d think he’d be bragging a lot more about his success rate if they worked, but all we hear about is this one incredibly lucky fellow.
This is the world of Catholicism, though. Reason has no role in it, sense doesn’t matter, and statistics? What’s that? Dead man’s beads are going to get the credit, but not the surgery and care that contributed more to the recovery than superstition.
Yesterday, King’s stupid poll was all about ‘curing’ autism. Today, he asks,
Yes 54%
No 46%
Why, no, Larry, I don’t…and I think people who do are rather ridiculous, except when they’re desperate, in which case they’re just sad.
Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor, the guy we’re all going to have to rely on to pull the economy out of the mess it is in, is Larry Summers. We cannot trust Larry Summers. He’s in the pocket of the people responsible for our problems.
Among the firms that paid Summers large amounts in speaking fees include J.P. Morgan Chase. That bank offered the former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary $67,500 for a February 1, 2008 engagement. It has received $25 billion in government bailout funds.
Citigroup, which has received $50 billion in taxpayer help, paid Summers $45,000 for a speech in March 2008 and another $54,000 for a speech that May.
Goldman Sachs, which has received $10 million in bailout funds, paid Summers $135,000 for a speech on April 16, 2008 and another $67,500 for a speech on June 18, 2008.
Summers also received about $5.2 million over the past year in salary from the major hedge fund D.E. Shaw.
I know whose side Larry Summers is on, and it isn’t the middle class or the poor.
Another question: what does a $135,000 speech sound like? I come from an academic background, where we fairly routinely bring in scientists to give lectures and spend a day talking with colleagues, and it’s fairly dense stuff, with lots of information. We generally pay travel costs (of course) and an honorarium of a few hundred to a thousand dollars. It’s very good value for the money. There are popular heavy-hitters like Richard Dawkins who can get $10,000 for a talk, but even there they may waive the fee, as we saw in Oklahoma, and even so, they can pack an auditorium with thousands of people who want to hear what they have to say.
Would thousands of people line up to buy tickets to hear Larry Summers speak? Does he really have the kind of significant information to transmit that would be worth a hundred thousand dollars for an hour of time? If so, I’d like to know more about these kinds of valuable speeches, because I’d love to pay off my entire mortgage with an afternoon’s work.
Of course, we all know that these speeches are irrelevant. It’s a way for organizations with a lot of power and money to funnel cash to individuals with a lot of influence in government…i.e., it’s a form of corruption, a kind of bribe. Even if it’s nominally legal, I hope Obama is smart enough to kick this shill for the financial empires off of his advisory team.
Glenn Greenwald has more to say on Summers. He calls the payoffs an “advanced bribe”.
