Foobaww first!

A former Texas public school teacher has sent me some stories from their career there. It’s not pretty. The situation is what I also recollect from my long-ago days in a Yankee high school, though, so I don’t know that we can just blame Texas, but it’s true — the system is often set up to give athletes (including cheerleaders) academic privileges that other students don’t get. Student athletes were expected to always pass their classes to maintain eligibility, no matter how poorly they did, and teachers were chastised if they compromised athletic eligibility.

Here’s a letter that was sent out to all teachers at a Texas high school, gently reminding them of what they must do — either pass students or give them an incomplete — so that the football team doesn’t suffer.

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Cache bugginess

I’m getting reports that a lot of you haven’t seen anything new at Freethoughtblogs Pharyngula. I’ve been posting stuff there! Apparently, there’s a glitch somewhere in caching, and it’s not clear to me whether it’s a problem on our end, or on your end — for some reason, your browser is loading an old cached copy of the page rather than the latest.

Anyway, if you clear your cache (don’t ask me how), you get to see the latest content. I’m hoping someone here can say what we can do to make this a more permanent fix.

Markuze rumors

Dennis Markuze, the obsessed spammer from Montreal, has been silent since late last week — no insane death threats in my email, no furious twitter followups to everything I say, no word anywhere. It has been a very pleasant relief.

I have heard however that he has actually been taken into custody and brought before a judge, and that he’s not responding well. I’m hoping that he gets the psychiatric attention he desperately needs: I don’t want him hurt, I want him better. The Montreal police are reported to be planning to issue a press release in the next day or two.

All is confirmed. The Montreal police announce an arrest, and apparently Mabus’s computers have been seized. Tim Farley has a very thorough summary of events.

“Mabus” apparently posted a series of apologies via twitter to a number of people just before dropping out (I didn’t get any!). If you read them on Farley’s page, though, they don’t sound a thing like Markuze…I wonder if his mother was desperately trying to do some damage control?

Boycott Sugarland

An accident at a fair in Indiana has killed five people. But the big news is that God saved a couple of country western singers from the duo Sugarland from risk!

Whatever it was, members of Sugarland can thank stage manager Hellen Rollens for saving their lives by making a spur-of-the-moment decision to hold a prayer circle just before the stage collapsed last Saturday at the Indiana State Fair.

Looks like God was listening. Here’s what happened.

Sugarland’s manager, Gail Gellman, credited Rollens with keeping the country pop duo from walking down the ramp at the last second, just as a 70 mph gust of wind from an approaching storm caused the stage to topple over onto the crowd, killing five fans and injuring dozens of others.

“Everybody was standing in a prayer circle getting ready to go onstage, and [as Rollens] was walking down the ramp, the stage fell. So her decision to hold them for literally a minute saved every band member and crew’s life,” Gellman told the Associated Press.

Actually, don’t you suspect that this Rollens character frequently asks the band to waste time in prayer circles, so this was nothing exceptional? Wouldn’t it have been more impressive if God had spoken in warning to Hellen Rollens, so that she’d run out to warn everyone else and tell them to get away from danger, so that 5 people wouldn’t be dead?

Since this God is clearly an evil bastard who cares nothing for human life, and since the members of Sugarland must be agents of an evil, monstrous being who casually swats down their fans, I hope you’ll all join me in boycotting the insensitive wicked minions of this cruel god. Boycott Sugarland!*

*This is admittedly no sacrifice on my part since I’ve never heard of these dull-witted wankers before, and just the phrase “country pop duo” sends me fleeing.

Tough love thuggery under Jesus’ loving hands

New Bethany. New Beginnings. Rebekah Home for Girls. Hephzibah House. Second Chance Ranch. Rachel Academy. Circle of Hope Girls Ranch. These are all places that claim to offer succor to parents of ‘troubled teens’, safe houses where they can send their kids for discipline and loving assistance to overcome whatever has made them rowdy or morose or obstinate or disobedient, all those symptoms of independence, and turn them into cheerful, cooperative, socialized citizens of community conventionality. They all rely heavily on the appeal of Christianity, and their names resonate with biblical themes…when hearing invocations of Jesus to draw children out to isolated camps ought instead to fill everyone with the same sense of dread that hearing the Jaws theme music ought to do.

Predictably, these fly-by-night camps run by Jesus freaks all turn out to be hellholes.

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The JREF on TV? Maybe. I’m skeptical.

Tonight, at 10pm/9pm on ABC’s Primetime Nightline, there will be a show on psychic powers. The good news: they engaged the JREF, with James Randi and DJ Grothe, to contribute. The bad news: the teaser trailer doesn’t look skeptical at all, doesn’t mention the JREF, and seems to gush credulously over frauds. Obviously, this could go either of two ways: they’re going to string along the JREF, using them to put up the illusion of critical thinking, and end up putting on another pro-superstition show; or they’re leading along their audience, and are going to surprise them with a dash of hard, cold evidence and critical thinking.

I’m placing my bets. I guess we’ll have to tune in to see how it turns out.

A flat-earth challenge!

Here’s a compilation of arguments for a flat earth from 1885. I laughed, but this one demands a response.

Staunch flat-earther Wilbur Glenn Voliva (1870-1942) asked: “Where is the man who believes he can jump into the air, remaining off the earth one second, and come down to earth 193.7 miles from where he jumped up?” Hard to argue with that.

Wait, but I can argue with that! There’s something wrong with his calculations: I estimate that if I were stationary relative to the rotating earth for one second, I’d only travel about a quarter mile to the west. Disappointing.

Also, if the earth were spinning at 193 miles per second, a day would only be 2 minutes long.

There might also be something else wrong with his scenario, but who cares if he can’t even get the basic math right?

My eyeballs vomited to protect my brain from ingesting this stuff

I’ve been sent an amusing email exchange between a Swiss researcher and a gang of quacks promoting a New Age nonsense conference. I was particularly struck by the email advertising the conference: “struck” is exactly the right word, because reading it was like getting punched in the eyeball. Because I love you readers so much, and think that you should all share in my pain, I have included a copy of this letter below the fold. I hope you like primary colors and random color changes!

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