I am lukewarm on Biden, but I have to say this: he was really smart in his choice of press secretary. Jen Psaki is a star.
You would think a journalist would know better than to claim “a lot of Americans are saying” — especially when it turns out she has her notes in front of her that translates “a lot of Americans” into one stupid, dishonest, inept and particular American.
Way to lean in hard into the stereotypes, Karen from Texas. She has written a two-part column for the Orange Leader, a newspaper in Texas, and the editor accepted it, which tells you the paper has no standards.
It’s interesting because I’m sure that if you asked her, she would tell you that she worked hard on this essay, doing lots of “research”, or rather, her idea of research. I can tell how she approached it: she started with an a priori commitment to the idea that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, fired up Google, and searched for stories that affirmed her belief, and then packaged up a list of anecdotes and sent it in. This is not research. That’s not how any of this works.
Every semester I get assigned a group of students to shepherd through a senior thesis assignment. I always tell them the first thing to do is ask a question, and that the purpose of their research is to explore the world of potential answers that have been discussed in the scientific literature, and compose a synthesis of the information from quality sources to suggest the most likely answer. Along the way, they are supposed to discuss how those answers were reached and assess the methods used.
For instance, if Karen were to phrase this as “Did dinosaurs and humans live at the same time?”, well, it’s a silly question because that’s been definitively answered with a strong “no”, but if it were asked sincerely and she reviewed the breadth of the good literature honestly, she might learn something. She did not. All of her “research” was focused on gleaning the minority response of “yes”, and she never cared that she only got that answer from low quality sources at the bottom of the barrel, and she doesn’t even try to analyze how they reached their conclusions.
I include the whole thing so you can see what I mean — it’s a litany of assertions that she has compiled, all of which support her beliefs, not one contrary perspective among them.
I believe that Dinosaurs walked this earth but not 140 million years ago like scientist claim.
Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, according to the 2010 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.
The question was asked “Did humans live at the same time as the dinosaurs?” Three in ten Texas voters agree that they did live at the same time; 41 percent disagree, and 30 percent don’t know.
Evangelical Christians make up approximately 25% of the U.S. population. A majority of them think the Bible should be read literally and that evolution is false.
In Kentucky there is a Creation Museum, which promotes a very specific version of this belief, which holds that God made the universe in six 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago. (A lot of Christians say 6,000 to 10,000 years). And yes, they have dinosaurs in this creation museum.
[An appeal to popularity only tells me that the Texas educational system is bad.]
According to the Hindustan Times on March 2, 2021, “Scientists have unearthed in Argentina’s Patagonian wilderness; fossils of what may be the oldest-known member of the dinosaur group known as titanosaurs, that includes the largest land animals in Earth’s history”.
They say it is a group of long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs, and is supposed to be 115 feet. They do state the skeletal was incomplete, but they haven’t finished digging it up since it was just recently found.
Many Scientist have poured cast of missing bones and constructed an animal, only to put it in a museum and call it factual.
Most people are not refuting the fact that there were dinosaurs, but they refute the fact that they didn’t live with humans.
[Inconsistent. She says she believes dinosaurs existed, but then she casts doubt on the one story about finding a dinosaur fossil that she cites. Why don’t you accept the reality of this fossil, Karen?]
I recently watched a video on dinosaurs, and a school teacher of Science was the one sharing the facts. But this Science teacher got it right. He stated that dinosaurs waked the earth with man. How else would they know what pictures to draw on cave walls that look exactly like dinosaurs? They have found drawings of Woolly Mammoths, Triceratops and men, drawn together fighting.
This is a classic hunter, posing with a 10-point deer these days, showing off his trophy, except they didn’t have cameras then.
[She watched a video. By whom? This sounds like a Kent Hovind story, and no, he is not a credible source. This is all vague and poorly sourced, but I’ll quote the Smithosonian’s assessment of one set of supposed dinosaur pictograms:
While certainly the most prominent, the supposed sauropod was not the only dinosaur carving creationists thought they saw on the bridge. Three other dinosaur depictions have been said to exist, but Senter and Cole easily debunked these, as well. One of the “dinosaurs” was nothing but a mud stain; a proposed Triceratops was just a composite of petroglyphs that do not represent animals, and what has been described as a carving of Monoclonius was nothing more than an enigmatic squiggle. There are no dinosaur carvings on Kachina Bridge.
Or you can read this analysis of a supposed pterosaur painting published in Science. Sorry, Karen, these don’t hold up.]
In 600 BC, under the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian artist was commissioned to shape reliefs of animals on the structures associated with the Ishtar Gate. Many centuries later, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey stumbled upon the gate, and was rediscovered in 1899.
The animals appear in alternating rows with lions, fierce bulls, and curious long-necked dragons (Sirrush). The lions and bulls would have been present at that time in the Middle East, but on what creature did the ancient Babylonians model the dragon? Koldewey believed that the Sirrush was a portrayal of a real animal and in 1918, he proposed that the dinosaur Iguanodon was the closest known match to the Sirrush.
Both the description there, and the image on these walls, which are now displayed in a Berlin Museum, appear to fit a sauropod dinosaur.
[I’ve seen paintings of the Balrog. Does that make it real? Ancient art illustrates all kinds of chimeras, centaurs, mermaids, dog-people, etc. Is this evidence that they actually exist, or that humans have an imagination?]
In Glen Rose, Texas there are huge dinosaur tracks in the limestone. I’ve been there, and have walked in those tracks. There are man-tracks in the limestone as well. The historical plaque states the tracks were formed 100 million years ago which is incorrect, but they do recognize them as dinosaur tracks.
What they don’t recognize is the man tracks in the same limestone? As a matter of fact, there are three different types of dinosaur tracks located there.
[The man-tracks are fakes.]
Next week we will look at Job, and how God tells Job to behold these mighty creatures. How could Job behold these mighty creatures if Job had not seen them? We will also talk about why this is important in the Christian realm.
[Behold! The starship USS Enterprise! How can you behold that if it does not have material, physical reality?]
Yeah, I don’t think she made a reasonable case there, but it is a fairly representative example of creationist “research”.
Look who was hanging out in our dining room:
Salticus scenicus
The Ethical Society of St Louis is holding a free online event:
From some of the insurrectionists who laid siege to the US Capitol, to the angry politics of conservative leaders like Senator Josh Hawley, Christian nationalism is on the rise in America. But what exactly is this dangerous ideology; what is its relationship to mainstream Christianity; and how can we face the threat it poses to our democracy and our communities?
ZOOM MEETING ID: 384 422 5785
Join the Ethical Society of St. Louis and Center for Freethought Equality to learn from a panel of distinguished experts who will help us understand–and confront–the threat of Christian nationalism.
Panelists:
– Dr. Sabrina Dent, Senior Faith Adviser at Americans United for Separation of Church and State;
– Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism; and
– Amanda Tyler, Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty
I’ve heard Stewart speak, and she’s very good. I’ll look forward to getting the perspectives of the others. Friday at 7pm Central, hope to see you there!
In case you were curious, here’s the boring routine for maintaining a colony of cute little Parasteatoda juveniles. Teenagers! Always demanding your time.
Right now I’ve got a sink full of dirty spider containers. I’ll have to get those cleaned up this week.
Here’s Alex Jones’ real opinion of Trump (probably).
He wishes he’d never met them, but he still jumped on the gravy train and rode it hard for as long as he could. Like every Republican.
The right-wing freakout over Dr Seuss is amusing. The get everything wrong, but there is such wild-eyed outrage over his publisher not publishing books containing offensive illustrations.
Yes. That’s how it works. The people who own his works are exercising their right to not publish them. It’s not censorship, and it’s not driven by some imaginary leftist cancel culture.
I’ve been reading Seuss for most of my life, we read his books to our kids, and there are some that are popular with my granddaughter right now. They’re great books! No one is taking the Cat in the Hat out behind the chemical sheds. But there are definite examples of crude stereotyping of Asian and black people in some of them, and they taint the good.
I knew that Theodore Geisel had worked as a propagandist during WWII, as did some of the great cartoonists associated with the Warner Brothers label. If he were still alive, he’d probably be relieved to see that his racist works were being removed from the shelves of children’s libraries. We shouldn’t forget that Geisel approved of the internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry, or that he used crude steretoypes of African people, but it’s for the best that that stuff isn’t used in humorous primers intended to help children learn to read.
My grandfather fought in the Pacific during WWII, and came back filled with a lot of hatred and bigotry (which he did not outgrow, unlike Theodore Geisel). While I would like my grandkids to know something about their great grandparents at some point, I’m not going to start by sitting down and teaching them all the slurs Grandpa used for Asian people. That would be taking the wrong message from the experience.
Sandra Steingraber had one of those ideal academic positions. She was doing interdisciplinary work at Ithaca College on climate justice, one of those important roles that doesn’t fit into a tidy niche. She was good at it!
For the past 18 years, I have served as our campus’ scholar in residence, recruited by a previous provost with a vision for shaping the college into a laboratory for environmental sustainability.
My post has been a joyful one. As a biologist with a master’s degree in poetry, a background in journalism and a national platform in the climate movement, I have represented Ithaca College around the world — in Congressional briefings, at the Paris climate meetings and inside church basements in struggling communities on the frontlines of environmental injustice.
My interdisciplinary scholarship and activism were welcomed on campus, and I flourished, authoring books, editing monographs and collaborating with filmmakers to create narratives that speak truth to power.
In addition to teaching my own class within the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences (ENVS), I serve as a guest speaker across campus. My position thus offers me an extraordinary view of the Ithaca College curriculum.
I have to admire that kind of work. I’m in easy mode, in some ways: I teach canonical biology, the kinds of courses every university has to offer if they issue biology degrees, so I fit neatly into a pre-defined slot (it’s a competitive slot, though, which means it’s hard to find that position without a hundred other people fighting for it). Steingraber had to carve out her role from multiple disciplines, and also serve multiple disciplines. That’s not easy, especially since the Powers That Be — provosts seem to mostly be business people and doctors — typically lack any knowledge of what’s going on at the ground level, and don’t understand how the glue that ties together the components of an education can be just as important as the familiar scholarly groupings.
Steingraber’s position doesn’t seem to have been at risk, though. She was putting together a Center for Climate Justice, which would be quite a feather in the cap of the Powers That Be, since they love bragging to donors about Centers with fancy names. She even had a grant award to help pay for it all. But the university just had to go and do something stupid and short-sighted.
Last year, encouraged by Provost Cornish, I sought funding to launch a Center for Climate Justice at Ithaca College. My idea was to create a national destination for students seeking engagement with the climate crisis that would equip them with tools to envision a renewable future, and make it so.
To that end, I joined fellow faculty and staff serving on IC’s Climate Action Group. This committee worked for the better part of last year, drafting recommendations and helping to shape my own ambitious proposal.
The good news: after a year of planning and writing, I got the grant.
The bad news: both faculty co-chairs of the Climate Action Group are now among those losing their jobs as a consequence of Academic Program Prioritization, which, as far as I can see, is disaster capitalism for higher education.
All told, at least nine IC professors who teach some aspect of the climate crisis — in five different departments — are on the chopping block, with Recreation and Leisure Studies disappearing altogether.
Here’s the thing: When an administration decides that the most important task is aligning the size of the faculty to the correct proportion and does so by eliminating non-tenure track faculty, unique, irreplaceable areas of expertise are lost.
It’s our contingent and NTEN faculty who are engaged in some of the most innovative, intersectional, progressive teaching on campus. I know because I’ve literally taught across our curriculum for 18 years.
They cut the foundation she needed for such a goal! They looked at the whole university, saw the things they liked and wanted to keep, and figured all the stuff outside of that was disposable and chopped it, unaware of how university programs are interdependent. Imagine what it would be like if administrators looked at my university, saw that biology brings in lots of tuition money and leads to what they think are obvious money-making careers, and decided that Art didn’t contribute to that, or the Humanities, and hey, aren’t the Social Sciences all fake anyway? And then they decided to double the funding for lab courses and pay for it by firing half of the “useless” faculty. I would hope all the science faculty would reject such a ludicrous idea. Our students are here to learn how to think and begin to take on the breadth of human understanding, they are not here to get trained as a lab tech. I teach a narrow slice of the domain of knowledge, and I rely on my colleagues to teach all the rest. I sure can’t do it.
So Steingraber looked at the direction the college was taking, refused her grant award, and resigned.
Wow. That’s courage. I salute you, Sandra Steingraber, and I hope you land a new position where your talents will be appreciated.
On the other hand, it was only a small sacrifice.
I’ll be leaving Ithaca College at the end of this year. I am sorry. I wanted to build a thriving Center for Climate Justice here, but I’m demoralized and aware that the collective intellectual capacity I was counting on is being sacrificed to austerity.
Finally, and because I believe in transparency: my salary is $31,050.
I am horrified, but not surprised. Universities are run by people who like to count beans, and see the faculty, the major expense they have, as the best place to chisel out lots of beans.
I kind of hope that she had a half-time position, because that salary is ridiculously low. Only kind of, though, because if they’re throwing that much responsibility on a part-time position, that tells you how little they prioritized her job.
I’ve written a few times about how biology is more complex than people think, that all the people claiming that biology dictates that there are only two genders are liars and fools, and that we should be far more inclusive in our perspective. However, I am not a trans person; I’m a comfortable cis-het white man, ensconced in the most privileged socio-cultural group in the country, and that puts me in an awkward position. It means that by default, when I think about these issues, I lapse into thinking about them from an outsiders perspective, as someone who is safely above it all, and most likely, I’ll think about it as a science problem. The transphobes are abusing science and are citing bad science, and so what I need to do is hammer back with good science.
Science isn’t going to win this one. When the argument turns to strangers trying to affirm or deny my identity on the basis of biological particulars, I head for the hills like the dinosaurs in Fantasia running from the T. rex. That’s because trans rights are not a scientific issue. They are a human rights issue. There is certainly a lot we could say—and that I would honestly love to know!—about human sexual variation, the effects of hormone replacement therapy, why hoped-for bodily changes are so emotionally fulfilling, and more. Some of these things might be wonderful topics for biology classes; imagine if every high schooler in America were educated to understand that human sex itself comes with a lot of variation. (Thinking back to my younger, closeted self, that would have helped!) But, in terms of deciding how I, as a trans person, am going to move through the world, all the information about hormones and biology affects three people, at most: my doctor, my partner, and myself. That’s all.
I see and respect the point. It would be easy to fall into the trap of cis boys shouting back and forth about the science, who is wrong, who is right, swapping journal citations and studies, and forget that all the rarefied pomposity is going on above the bodies of real people who are suffering. It’s easy for me to talk about the various tissues and organs of developing embryos and lose sight of the fact that I don’t have a direct stake in the game, and for the people who do, it’s not a game at all. It’s not something that can be settled with science!
All this time spent debating “the science” of where transgender people belong in society only confuses a truth many are struggling to accept. It is a distraction no matter which side of the argument you are on, because you are complicating and putting up for debate something that is very simple. Trans men are men. Trans women are women. Nonbinary people are valid. Trans people have always been here. We are here now. We will continue to be.
I’ll put that front and center in my head from now on. That’s the primary issue in this struggle. The transphobes are trying to abolish the fundamental equality of all people, and set aside a small group for discrimination and oppression, and the danger is that they can use the physical and psychological diversity of human beings as a tool to justify turning those differences into the basis of hatred.
Do Christians get the funny drilled out of them? I ask because I recently got this ad from Ray Comfort:
Don’t try to analyze it. It’s about as funny as a fart, which means you have to be in a certain state of mind to be amused, and even then, it’s not going to be a clever joke, let alone one of the “world’s funniest one-liners”. It’s just part of the Living Waters grift — you can buy the booklet for $10, which is probably almost entirely profit for Ray, especially since buying it would immediately put you on his mailing list of gullible people.
Oh, also, he gives the content away for free! The ordering info includes the complete text, which is nice. There isn’t much that’s funny in there, though.
101 of the World’s Funniest One Liners
1. Ninety-nine percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
2. Borrow money from a pessimist — they don’t expect it back.
3. Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.
4. Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
5. I didn’t fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.
6. Never answer an anonymous letter.
7. It’s lonely at the top; but you do eat better.
8. I don’t suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it.
9. Always go to other people’s funerals, or they won’t go to yours.
10. Few women admit their age; few men act it.
11. If we aren’t supposed to eat animals, why are they made with meat?
12. No one is listening until you make a mistake.
13. Give me ambiguity or give me something else.
14. We have enough youth. How about a fountain of “Smart”?
15. He who laughs last thinks slowest.
16. Campers: Nature’s way of feeding mosquitoes.
17. Always remember that you are unique; just like everyone else.
18. Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.
19. There are three kinds of people: Those who can count and those who can’t.
20. Why is “abbreviation” such a long word?
21. Nuke the Whales.
22. I started out with nothing and I still have most of it.
23. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
24. Out of my mind. Back in five minutes.
25. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
26. As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in public schools.
27. Laugh alone and the world thinks you’re an idiot.
28. Sometimes I wake up grumpy; other times I let her sleep.
29. The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the ability to reach it.
30. You can’t have everything; where would you put it?
31. I took an IQ test and the results were negative.
32. Okay, who stopped the payment on my reality check?Editorial: Probably the most thought-provoking one-liner is “Eat right. Stay fit. Die anyway.” It’s sad but true — no matter what you do, you will die. This is because you have sinned against God. Let’s see if that’s true: Have you ever lied (even once)? Ever stolen (anything)? Jesus said, “Whoever looks upon a woman to lust after her, has committed adultery already with her in his heart.” Ever looked with lust? If you have said “Yes” to these three questions, by your own admission, you are a lying, thieving, adulterer at heart; and we’ve only looked at three of the Ten Commandments. How will you do on Judgment Day? Will you be innocent or guilty? You know that you will be guilty, and end up in Hell. That’s not God’s will. He provided a way for you to be forgiven. He sent His Son to take your punishment: “God commended His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus then rose from the dead and defeated death. God promises everlasting life to all those who confess and forsake their sins, and trust in Jesus Christ. Please do that today . . . you may not have tomorrow. See John 14:21 for a wonderful promise. Then read the Bible daily and obey what you read. God will never let you down.
33. We are born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse.
34. 42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
35. Be nice to your kids. They’ll choose your nursing home.
36. If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
37. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges.
38. Eat right. Stay fit. Die anyway.
39. My mind is like a steel trap, rusty and illegal in 37 states.
40. Nothing is fool proof to a sufficiently talented fool.
41. On the other hand, you have different fingers.
42. I’ve only been wrong once, and that’s when I thought I was wrong.
43. God made mankind. Sin made him evil.
44. I don’t find it hard to meet expenses. They’re everywhere.
45. I just let my mind wander, and it didn’t come back.
46. Don’t steal. The government hates competition.
47. Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
48. National Atheist’s Day April 1st.
49. All generalizations are false.
50. The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.
51. Work is for people who don’t know how to fish.
52. If you don’t like the news, go out and make some.
53. For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism.
54. IRS: We’ve got what it takes to take what you have got.
55. I’m out of bed and dressed. What more do you want?
56. I used to think I was indecisive, but now I’m not too sure.
57. I can handle pain until it hurts.
58. No matter where you go, you’re there.
59. If everything is coming your way, then you’re in the wrong lane.
60. It’s been Monday all week.
61. Gravity always gets me down.
62. This statement is false.
63. Eschew obfuscation.
64. They told me I was gullible…and I believed them.
65. It’s bad luck to be superstitious.
66. According to my best recollection, I don’t remember.
67. The word “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary.
68. Honk if you like peace and quiet.
69. The Big Bang Theory: God Spoke and BANG! it happened.
70. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
71. Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular?
72. Save the whales. Collect the whole set.
73. A day without sunshine is like, night.
74. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
75. Corduroy pillows: They’re making headlines!
76. Gravity: It’s not just a good idea, it’s the LAW!
77. Life is too complicated in the morning.
78. We are all part of the ultimate statistic — ten out of ten die.
79. Nobody’s perfect. I’m a nobody.
80. Ask me about my vow of silence.
81. The hardness of butter is directly proportional to the softness of the bread.
82. The last thing on earth you want to do will be the last thing you do.
83. Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else get your way.
84. If ignorance is bliss, then tourists are in a constant state of euphoria.
85. If at first you don’t succeed, don’t try skydiving.
86. If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?
87. Stop repeat offenders. Don’t re-elect them!
88. I intend to live forever. So far so good.
89. Who is “General Failure” and why is he reading my hard disk?
90. What happens if you get scared half to death twice?
91. I used to have an open mind but my brains kept falling out.
92. Energizer Bunny arrested; charged with battery.
93. I didn’t use to finish sentences, but now I
94. I’ve had amnesia as long as I can remember.
95. Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.
96. Vacation begins when Dad says, “I know a short cut.”
97. Evolution: True science fiction.
98. What’s another word for “thesaurus”?
99. Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
100. A flashlight is a case for holding dead batteries.
101. I went to the fights, and a hockey game broke out.
. . . Don’t forget to read the editorial!
Right. The editorial is the whole point, that and the $10 and getting on his mailing list.
He doesn’t even include his very best joke!
Man, Christians can be scary people. How does he know what God says? If you snuck into his house and wired his bed with hidden speakers that whispered unspeakable suggestions to him all night, you could get him to do some very scary shit. I also hope he never gets schizophrenia.
