The Hatfield Marine Science Center Visitor Center has an Octo-Cam trained on a giant Pacific octopus — I just checked and the beast is cruising about.
Although…they also have a warning on the site that heavy visitor loads put a strain on the server. I may have just broken it.
It’s a calibrated infographic illustrating the highest highs and the lowest lows on the planet. Bring in the kids and have them scroll up and down for hours.
It includes the Deepwater Horizon. Boy, that thing was way, way down there.
Guess who has been the recipient of state funds for their superstition scam? Michele Bachmann and her husband!
Bachmann and Associates, Inc., a counseling center that receives state funds and is owned by Rep. Michele Bachmann and her husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann, uses counseling methods steeped in fundamentalist Christianity, raising questions about its use of taxpayer money.
Founded in 2003, Bachmann’s clinic has taken in nearly $30,000 in state funds since 2007. Dr. Bachmann has said publicly that God heals people at his clinic and that Jesus Christ is the “Almighty Counselor.”
“We are distinctly a Christian counseling agency here in the Twin Cities,” he told KKMS radio in 2008. “We have 27 Christian counselors, Christ-centered, very strong in our understanding of who the Almighty Counselor is, and as we rely on God’s word and the Almighty Counselor, we have the opportunity to change people’s lives.”
Here’s how the quacks at this place describe their work:
“Jesus as the Son of God is the Savior, Healer, and intimate Lover of my soul,” said one therapist on the clinic’s Web site. “He invites those He calls to join Him on a personal journey to the Cross. Our entire being is healed and restored (body, soul, and spirit) as we surrender ‘our way’ for ‘His way.'”
So this ‘organization’, basically a front for the Bachmann family con game, is getting state money…and on top of that, it’s flamboyantly religious, little more than a church masquerading as therapy.
It’s corruption, plain and simple. But then, that’s what these Republicans do best.
(via Religion Clause)
Scott Hatfield, a fellow who comments here from time to time, is planning to do coursework in the Galapagos — for the good of the students, of course, he couldn’t possibly enjoy spending time on some exotic islands in the Pacific. You’ll have to stop by and see what he’s up to, and if you can, donate to help him meet the expenses. For the students.
This is a good way to do an interview with Randi: completely cut out the boring interviewer and let the interviewee talk at length. Great fun!
If you go to the Big Think page, there’s an index to sections of the talk if you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing. You can also leave comments. One peculiar thing is that there are almost no comments there yet, and in fact the only section that seems to have any comments is the one titled “Science will never support religion”…and it’s nothing but whiny apologists for faith. Don’t bother reading them. It would be nice if people would discuss some of the other parts of this long interview.
By the way, Randi will be in Copenhagen next week, he’s a wonderful conversationalist and you should take advantage of him if you can!
You may have noticed one thing about our so-called free society: there is one group of professional, well-educated, articulate people who have been de facto forbidden to speak aloud about their views. Those people are our teachers. In particular, if they dare to express liberal, socially conscious views in ways that risk a difference of opinion getting back to parents or, jebus forbid, donors and community activists, we all know what will happen: they will be fired. The teachers know this, too — almost all of them willingly self-muzzle, because it has been repeated over and over to them that actually having a social conscience will damage their relationship to their students.
It’s all a big lie.
It’s really an attempt — and so far, a very effective attempt — to silence a whole class of people who might say something enlightened about society and teaching. It’s disgusting to see how often it works.
Here’s a perfect example: Elizabeth Collins was a liberal, concerned teacher who created a blog to express her views about stuff she cared very much about, such as writing, teaching, and activism. Read it, it’s good stuff, and it’s obvious she cares passionately about those subjects. She also wrote about her experiences as a teacher, taking care to avoid naming the school or any individuals by name, but still being free about criticism and praise while protecting people’s privacy.
I know, most of you are already going “uh-oh”, and you already know where this is going. I also know that a lot of you have absorbed the recieved wisdom and are thinking that she deserves anything that happens to her, that she should know better than to talk about her teaching. You in the last group…you’re a bunch of assholes, and you’re part of the problem. Go away. I want teachers to write openly and frankly and honestly about teaching, and you don’t.
Yes, Elizabeth Collins was fired.
Her story is getting the expected responses, like this:
Enjoy unemployment you liberal, Dem, socialist, borderline commie hack that can’t tolerate an opionion that differs from your own. You got exactly what you deserved. Keep blindly following Obumbler. How’s that working out for you?
I don’t see that Collins demonstrated intolerance; she’s the one fired, not anyone else. If you want to see intolerance, look to the rich dogmatic conservatives who flexed a little muscle and expelled a thoughtful person from the school.
In a Feb. 24 posting, Collins wrote about unfounded accusations that teachers can face. Referring to the Whites’ e-mail – without naming names or spelling out the context – she added, “I realized I was dealing with some hard-core provincialism – not to mention intolerance of anything but ultraconservative views.”
Collins was crossing swords with prominent members of the local Catholic community. In 2009, James White received the Sourin Award from the Catholic Philopatrian Literary Institute for exemplifying Catholic ideals. (Cardinal Justin Rigali was given the award the year before.) He is also a trustee on several Catholic school boards, and James and Megan White and his construction company, J.J. White Inc., are donors to several Catholic schools, including Notre Dame de Namur.
…
The school showed the document to Collins and she wrote a reply in which she said that at the March 3 meeting, the Whites had “proceeded to harangue me, raising their voices, pointing at me, slapping the table.” She added that James White had demanded her resignation and threatened to sue the school.
He certainly does represent Catholic ideals in his little crusade to get anyone with different political views fired! And is anyone else surprised that it is conservative Christianity behind the firing? The Whites and their smug arrogance and tiny little minds are the problem here, not Elizabeth Collins. It’s too bad there isn’t an easy way to dethrone such vile thugs from their undeserved positions of respect in these communities.
We need to do more to protect teachers from this kind of bullying, this policy of silencing their contributions to society; actually, though, it’s an asymmetric silencing, because teachers who express conservative views, who echo the dogmatic stupidity of their communities, do not experience this kind of oppression (unless they cross the line into physically injuring students, and even then the community tends to rally around them). You can be an openly Republican gay-hating commie-bashing environment-trashing teacher, but if you’re a lesbian socialist civil rights activist in most parts of the country, you know what you have to do: you have to be very quiet and not raise a fuss if you want to keep your job.
And please note, I’m not talking about what you do in the classroom — there are reasonable restrictions on what you can do there, and there is also a specific set of tasks that you are expected to complete in order to do your job — but entirely outside the class, in your private life. There aren’t many jobs with those kinds of repressive restrictions. You can be a plumber or a carpenter or a taxi driver or a farmer or a Republican politician, and you can get off work and drink or gamble or vote for Ron Paul or Barney Frank, and be open about your views, and it won’t usually trickle back to your boss as a sign that you aren’t fit to unclog drains or plant asparagus. But write on a blog about social justice, civil rights for gays, or your support for public health care, and watch out — there are people who will decide that you are a bad influence on children.
Never mind that there are better reasons to keep devout Catholics away from kids than to so restrain liberal Democrats.
Again, this is not about a teacher keeping a Bible or Chairman Mao’s little red book on their desk, and flogging it to the students (either of which are reprehensible). It’s about what a teacher does on their own time, outside the school, and somehow we’ve got this attitude that teachers must be social ciphers in all circumstances. Teachers should have a right to be Christians or Communists (not that Collins is the latter, and I have no clue about her opinions on the former), but so far, the only privilege they’re usually granted is to be ideologically mainstream.
There is a poll associated with this story. The wording is good: does she deserve to be fired, which makes it easy for me; no, I don’t think she does, because no employer has the right to police the thoughts of its employees, and thoughtcrime should not be punishable. There’s a different question that isn’t relevant here: Does a private school have the right to fire someone for causes like this, and then I’d have to say that yes, they do. Because private schools can be pocket tyrannies. It just means that you shouldn’t work for such wretched institutions.
Did the teacher deserve to be fired for the blog post?
Yes 42.9%
No 50.5%
Not sure 6.6%
One other aspect of this story that really bugs me is that some parents have the idea that their kids should not be criticized: a teacher is supposed to somehow teach without ever giving any kind of discouraging word when a student is wrong. I hate that attitude. Sorry, students get to be told when they’re being little jerks, or being obtuse and failing to follow simple instructions, or even when they’re being narrow-minded little bigots. Teachers are smart in being able to get those messages across without being demeaning, as comes across clearly in Collins’ blog, but no, you can’t require that teachers be supportive of bigotry and stupidity. It’s kind of a violation of the job description.
…but it is a pretty good rant against the climate change deniers. It’s just that it is from Bill Maher.
I like what he’s saying, but it’s hard to listen to the man when he says, “Mainstream media, stop pitting the ignorant vs the educated and framing it as a debate” and not think that maybe the same advice should apply to Ariana Huffington, or when he says, “It’s scientists vs non-scientists, and since the topic is science, the non-scientists don’t get to vote”, wanting to change that to “It’s doctors vs non-doctors, and since the topic is medicine, the non-doctors don’t get to vote”, something that Maher himself ought to take to heart.
It’s like Bambi vs. Godzilla, except no one would consider Donohue cute and innocent. In an interview, Hawking talked about gods:
“What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God,” Hawking told Sawyer. “They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.”
When Sawyer asked if there was a way to reconcile religion and science, Hawking said, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”
Straightforward and sensible, that’s a scientist talking. Bill Donohue, who is anything but sensible, took exception to all that.
How any rational person could belittle the pivotal role that human life plays in the universe is a wonder, but it is just as silly to say that all religions are marked by the absence of reason. While there are some religions which are devoid of reason, there are others, such as Roman Catholicism, which have long assigned it a special place.
Human life plays a pivotal role in the universe? How? Is the orbit of Mars influenced by human activities, does the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years away, care in the slightest about a species so remote that they’re still waiting for the glimmerings of light from the fires they used to roast a mammoth? We could wink out of existence right now and the universe would go on, fundamentally unchanged.
I agree that the Catholic church has assigned reason a special place: apologetics. Rationalizing the irrational. Throwing up a smokescreen of scholarship to hide the fact that deep down, they’re worshipping a jealous bronze age patriarchal myth wedded to a howling crazy Eastern mystery religion. But they aren’t any different than any other religion: for instance, the Baptists found universities and pay lip service to logic, too. As Hawking said, science works, and every charlatan in every church dreams of hitching a ride on its record.
It was the Catholic Church that created the first universities, and it was the Catholic Church that played a central role in the Scientific Revolution; these two historical contributions made possible Mr. Hawking’s career.
Reason, in pursuit of truth, has been reiterated by the Church fathers for nearly two millennia. That is why Hawking posits a false conflict: in the annals of the Catholic Church, there is no inherent conflict between science and religion. Quite the contrary: science and religion, in Catholic thought, are complementary properties. Ergo, nothing is gained by alleging a “victory” of science over religion.
The Catholic Church was a religion laced throughout the substrate of Western culture; everyone was Catholic (or alternatively, after the 16th century, some flavor of Protestant), and being anything else was not tenable because the Catholic Church would set you on fire. After centuries of waging war on every alternative that emerged, the Church does not now get to claim, “Oh, yeah, we did that” when a powerful and better way of thinking does manage to rise up out of the foolishness of superstition.
There is an inherent conflict between science and religion. Mr Donohue believes a cracker turns into a slice of god in his mouth; he thinks there is a magic man in the sky who speaks to the Pope; he believes a series of rituals will allow an invisible ghost in his body go to Disneyland in Space after his meat dies. He also believes that one young species of ape on this planet somehow plays a “pivotal role” in affairs on Jupiter. These are irrational, unscientific beliefs — they are anti-science, because he believes in arriving at conclusions because they are what he wishes to be true, or because the dogma has been repeated to him enough times, or because someone claims a supernatural revelation.
Sure, science arose out of Catholicism…in the same sense that plumbing, sanitation systems, and public health policies arose out of sewage.
Sven seemed to think it a fine idea to launch everyone into space in the last iteration of the cosmic thread, and who am I to argue? Zoooooom!
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