Atheist Activism Minus the Confrontation

At JT’s talk at CASH on Thursday, one of the audience members asked what people who didn’t have JT’s obvious taste for confrontation could do to help the atheist movement. JT had some good answers, I gave some suggestions, and we talked about the question a bit more after the session with Brianne and Heather Hegi, the incoming chair of the board of Minnesota Atheists. My brain kept working on the question for a while as well. What follows is a collection of suggestions from all these places.

Continue reading “Atheist Activism Minus the Confrontation”

Atheist Activism Minus the Confrontation
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We Stopped SOPA, Now for ACTA

I wish I could tell you exactly what ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) does. I can’t. Now, that isn’t because I haven’t researched the issue. It is instead because this is an international treaty that was negotiated in private. I can, and do below the fold, give you an opportunity to speak against it, no matter what country you’re in.

From the Electronic Freedom Foundation:

ACTA has several features that raise significant potential concerns for consumers’ privacy and civil liberties for innovation and the free flow of information on the Internet legitimate commerce and for developing countries’ ability to choose policy options that best suit their domestic priorities and level of economic development.

Continue reading “We Stopped SOPA, Now for ACTA”

We Stopped SOPA, Now for ACTA

On This Snowy Saturday Afternoon

Well, it’s snowy here at any rate, just warm enough to be working on icy. So it’s a good day to stay inside and get a few things accomplished. Maybe cooking a turkey isn’t on your list the way it is on mine, but the rest of these are worthy of your time and attention.

Awkward
Too unnatural?

First, go help Skepticon design the most inoffensive atheist banner ever. It is for two very good causes. It will help advertise Skepticon locally in St. Louis and Kansas City, and it will help to settle the question of whether it is possible to create a billboard that mentions atheists without people finding it offensive.

I recommend the awkward puppy and kitten combo for the billboard, but it may be too unnatural for some. It’s in last place currently.

Once you’ve done that, go sign a petition to allow students at Paradise Valley High School in Phoenix, AZ to set up a chapter of the Secular Student Alliance. The principal is currently requiring that the students who want an SSA chapter collect signatures from other students to say that this is okay. Of course, if the school allows any clubs at all, it is required by law to allow all clubs. When you sign the petition, feel free to express your feelings about a professional school administrator doing something that blatantly illegal.

Then it’s time to do something a little more you-centered. Find out what gender and age Google thinks you are. Me? I’m apparently a 45-54-year-old male. Then again, I’m not the only woman Google thinks is interested in “guy stuff.” The Mary Sue suggests that if you’re a female geek, you might want to change this to let Google know that geeky women exist. That’s assuming you’re cool with them knowing who you are. Then again, once Google’s privacy policies are “consolidated,” you’ll have less control over that, so you might as well make them get their facts straight.

After all that, it’s time to relax. May I suggest you get yourself some hot chocolate, hot cider, mulled wine, or tea, and check out Natalie’s first week of blogging here on FtB? Plenty there to read and think about until the sun comes out and all this snow melts.

On This Snowy Saturday Afternoon

Science Fair Spectacular

This fall, Freethought Blogs participated in the Donors Choose challenge to help fund special projects at U.S. schools. One of the projects readers of this blog helped to support was the Science Fair Spectacular.  The teacher who created the project recently posted a letter and some pictures.

Planning for Projects
Getting excited planning for projects.

I want you to know what an impact this activity has had on my students. Although we have just started picking our projects for the Science Fair, the students are very excited. It has definitely set an interest in science that may have not been there before. Just the other day, I had a student tell me that he never knew science could be so much fun. As we work toward our end product, the Science Fair, I suspect we will do a lot of growing and learning about many aspects of science. Because of you, this is possible! We are truly grateful!

With gratitude,
Mrs. Raspberry

Thank You
We <3 science. Thank you.

And thank you all again from me as well.

Science Fair Spectacular

This Year, Give Health

DrRubidium is a powerhouse. She’s finishing up her first semester of teaching, putting out weapons-grade snark at the JAYFK, and now she’s whipping up a vaccination campaign in the science blogosphere for the winter holidays.

Still looking for a Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, holiday-yet-to-be-invented gift for a loved (or tolerated) one?  Skip the damn tsotchkes.  Go with measles vaccines.  Yes, measles vaccines.

It turns out that the Red Cross allows you to donate to a campaign that provides vaccinations overseas. Cost is a dollar a shot, delivered.

This is a charitable gift, but it’s also a practical one. Here in the U.S., we have reached the point where even people whose parents forgo vaccination–for good reasons and specious ones–rarely pay the price in illness. However, when there is a measles outbreak among the unvaccinated and those with wonky immune systems, the source is generally someone who has just stepped off a plane.

Giving the gift of vaccination doesn’t just protect children in countries hurt by our colonialist pasts, though it does do that. It also protects the most vulnerable among us here. That’s a gift worth giving or receiving.

Forget getting your best friend Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3!  Get 50 vaccinations instead.  In that holiday card to your boss, let them know they’ve vaccinated 25 kids.  Splurge on that flats screen TV with you tax return.  For now, vaccinate a village — A WHOLE VILLAGE!

Listen to the woman. Go save some lives.

This Year, Give Health

Protect Our Right to Vote

A lot of people are focusing on the defeat of Mississipi’s “personhood” initiative. This is, indeed, an excellent thing, but what caught my attention happened in Maine.

In Maine, where a Tea Party-aligned Republican, Paul LePage, squeaked to victory in the governor’s race last year, voters restored same-day voter registration, which had been eliminated by LePage and his Republican allies in the Legislature earlier in the year. Like eroding collective bargaining rights, tightening restrictions on voting has emerged as another major point of emphasis for Republicans in statehouses across the country this year. The new laws that have been enacted or proposed generally affect traditionally Democratic constituencies disproportionately. The outcome in Maine wasn’t even close on Tuesday: 60 percent of voters defied LePage and the GOP and embraced same-day registration.

Sadly, Maine isn’t the only state where this has happened and needs to be corrected. Continue reading “Protect Our Right to Vote”

Protect Our Right to Vote

Thank You

Jason reminds me that I am remiss. Three more teachers have posted letters thanking you for contributing to Donors Choose during the challenge last month.

From Ms. Farless, whose Reading Is a Discount Ticket to Anywhere project we funded in the last two days it was open:

Words cannot begin to express my gratitude for your generous donations to my classroom library project. I have seen so many lives positively changed, simply by a a child picking up the right book. This is especially true of children living in poverty situations…sometimes a book can be not only a tool to further a student’s education…but an escape as well. Your dedication to education will be realized by these students…our future doctors, lawyers, teachers, and leaders. Again, thank you for investing in my project…and the future.

From Mrs. Richardson, whose project was Perfectly Balanced:

Continue reading “Thank You”

Thank You

About the American Cancer Society

A few years back, our friend Mary stayed with us for some months after her cancer surgery. Her tumor–which she named Binkie and kept in alcohol as a souvenir–was in her colon. She had what was originally meant to be a temporary ostomy. That means it wasn’t placed ideally for day-to-day maintenance.

Mary was on disability for what was supposed to be the period while she healed enough for a second surgery. It didn’t quite work out that way, and the period stretched out. Trying to get back into more normal activity, Mary decided to volunteer for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. She couldn’t do the walk, but she could hand out t-shirts and herd participants.

She was very enthusiastic–at first. Continue reading “About the American Cancer Society”

About the American Cancer Society

Matching Funds for the SSA

Yesterday, I asked those of you with Reddit accounts to help out the Secular Student Alliance, who were being drummed off the front page. It was a trivial thing, really, but it required only a trivial response. Thank you to those of you who gave the couple of clicks required.

Now the SSA has a bigger opportunity. The catch, of course, is that it requires a larger action on your part to help them. An SSA member has pledged funds of up to $20,000 to the SSA to match donations made between now and December 31. This includes both plain old donations of any size and memberships purchased during that time (which are also tax-deductible for those in the U.S.). Given that student memberships are only $10 and other memberships start at $35, this is a good time to swell their ranks.

Why? Because the SSA is there to support nonreligious students when, all too often, no one else is. In their own words:

We work to organize and empower nonreligious students around the country. Our primary goal is to foster successful grassroots campus groups which provide a welcoming community for secular students to discuss their views and promote their secular values. Though our office is based in Columbus, Ohio and our affiliated campus groups are predominantly in the United States, we do support affiliates around the world.

How We Support Student Groups
We support our affiliates in a variety of ways, including supplying literature and outreach supplies, group-running guides, hands-on assistance, discounted access to prominent speakers, and monetary project grants.

For individual students, we cooperate with other national nontheistic organizations to get discounted students rates for large events and provide travel grants to help the students attend. We hold regional summits and a national conference each year to give students leadership training and the opportunity to network and problem-solve with their peers.

The Secular Student Alliance devotes the majority of its resources to supporting its affiliate groups. We only offer this support to groups that further our mission. We have developed a set of standards to help campus groups determine if they should seek affiliation with us.

This includes high school groups as well as college, for a total of 314 campuses–and growing quickly.

So if you can, support their mission. Become a member or just give a little bit to help make sure someone else gives more.

And hey, whether or not you do that, they’re still looking for people to help them beat Campus Crusade for Christ in Facebook popularity. Yes, this one is trivial too, but again, it only takes two clicks.

Matching Funds for the SSA

In the Home Stretch

Yesterday, I pointed to a project in my Donors Choose challenge that was running out of time:

Reading Is a Discount Ticket to Anywhere

I require my students to read four books each grading quarter, and often times the books in our High School Library are above the students’ reading levels or are so dated as to be of little interest to my students. As I build a diverse classroom library that will entice students to read, I would like to expand that by providing books from genres that I know are of high interest to my students: realistic fiction and suspense. Diverse selections of young adult fiction will allow my students to gain confidence in their reading skills as they self-select books that are both interesting to them, as well as varying reading ability levels. Offering such a variety of select titles will encourage students to expand their book choices, and ultimately their love for reading.

Reading provides the frameworks for success in every field. Strong readers will ultimately be strong writers, strong in other subject areas, and strong thinkers. Without reading, a child can expect little success in life, as these skills are needed from everything to reading directions to enjoying a novel. Self-selected literature is the way to garner student interest in reading.

Several of you donated, Zhuge, DuWayne, Sarah, Stephen, Rebecca. Contributions big, small, and in between came in. They’ve put us more than halfway there. The total left to fully fund this project is just $213. That is completely reachable.

Won’t you please step over to the project and give even just a little bit to help get these kids their books? Don’t forget that Donors Choose will match you at 100% (on another project of your choosing). I still have some matching funds to contribute as well. Right now, small donations are not so small.

Come on. Let’s finish out the Freethought Blogs Donors Choose campaign with one more success and one more set of happy, well-educated kids.

Update: Thank you! Thanks to Allison, Steve, Cathy, and Josh, this project is now fully funded. I’ve had to give the rest of my matching donation to another project. I chose this one from Challenger School in Glendale, AZ:

Life As We Knew It – Integrating Science and Literature

My students need 40 copies of young adult novels, Life As We Knew It, to support integrating science and literature. In Seventh Grade students learn about space, eclipses, and tides as part of their science standards. I would like to provide them an exciting novel in reading that integrates these ideas as a major part of the plot. I feel this will provide students with an understanding of how information from science can be used to enhance literature. This novel will allow us an excellent opportunity to reinforce science in our reading class.

Your support will help me provide my students with access to an exciting novel. The book illustrates to students how understanding science is used in other areas of life. This novel provides an excellent opportunity for my students to build literacy for high school while reinforcing science standards.

I love projects that make science relevant and that promote cross-disciplinary thinking. Science isn’t a “thing.” It’s a part of our lives and a critical means of understanding our world. This project is also getting close to its deadline, with only nine days left. With my contribution, which is part of your contribution, it will only take another $223 to fully fund this project.

In the Home Stretch